Konstantin Nebel writes:
this is basically a question, what you guys prefer and do. I have a Linux destkop and recently I decided to buy a raspberry pi 4 (great device) and
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Now i attached a 4 tb drive to my pi and I decided what the heck, why not doing backups now. So now I am thinking. How should I approach backups. On windows it does magically backups and remind me when they didnt run for a while. I like that attitude.
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So I could do the backup on logout for example but I am not sure if that is not annoying so I'd like to have your opinion. Oh and yeah. I like to turn
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Whoever read till the end Im thankful and ready to hear your opinion.
[...] My opinion on the matter is this: Go for a good (fast) tool and trigger it often :) Borg has been mentioned and might be very good (I wrote my backup tool myself but that is probably less good :) ) About the times of triggering: For me (also as a "Desktop" user of sorts), I actually do a variant of backup on logout which is actually "backup before shutdown". I do it by using a custom script called `mahalt` which I invoke to shutdown my computer. Before triggering the actual shutdown, it invokes the backup procedure. As a "Laptop" user (current situation), I can really not be sure that I will have the time to await the backup (on my "Desktop" it takes about 2 minutes or so which is really acceptable for shutdown). Thus for the "Laptop" usage, I trigger backup manually once per day (usually as the last action of the day's computer usage) and it runs slightly faster because everything is on SSD. If that triggering intervals are good for you also depends on the amount of data. If it is much (as per >50 GiB or so), the detection of changed files (even with good tools) will take some considerable amount of time and thus a "more rare" triggering interval might be good. Still, triggering it entirely in background (so as to have enough "time" for the backup) should be considered with extreme care, because unexpectedly triggered backups can not only impair system performance but also backup an "inconsistent" state of sorts (e.g. opened files or partial directory structures if large parts of the structure are just being copied/renamed etc.). Btw. as I am paranoid when it comes to backups I always do multi-level backup: The first copy is on the very same computer's HDD (same for Laptop/Desktop), the second copy goes to a "mini" computer similar to Raspberry Pi. Then for the "Desktop" I usually have all HDDs on RAID1 and the "mini" computer synchronizes to an online file storage service. For the "Laptop" I sync to the "mini" computer and to a separate SD card (via rsync at the moment and also triggered manually once per day). In any case, at least one of the storage locations is offsite... HTH Linux-Fan
