Selfhosted

I'm always backing up with SyncThing in realtime, but every week I do an off-site type of tarball backup that isn't within the SyncThing setup.

I run Borg nightly, backing up the majority of the data on my boot disk, incl docker volumes and config + a few extra folders.

Each individual archive is around 550gb, but because of the de-duplication and compression it's only ~800mb of new data each day taking around 3min to complete the backup.

Borgs de-duplication is honestly incredible. I keep 7 daily backups, 3 weekly, 11 monthly, then one for each year beyond that. The 21 historical backups I have right now RAW would be 10.98tb of data. After de-duplication and compression it only takes up 407.98gb on disk.

With that kind of space savings, I see no reason not to keep such frequent backups. Hell, the whole archive takes up less space than one copy of the original data.

Once every 24 hours.

Backups???

Proxmox servers are mirrored zpools, not that RAID is a backup. Replication between Proxmox servers every 15 minutes for HA guests, hourly for less critical guests. Full backups with PBS at 5AM and 7PM, 2 sets apiece with one set that goes off site and is rotated weekly. Differential replication every day to zfs.rent. I keep 30 dailies, 12 weeklys, 24 monthly and infinite annuals.

Periodic test restores of all backups at various granularities at least monthly or whenever I'm bored or fuck something up.

Yes, former sysadmin.

I do not as I cannot afford the extra storage required to do so.

Daily backups here. Storage is cheap. Losing data is not.

I use Duplicati for my backups, and have backup retention set up like this:

Save one backup each day for the past week, then save one each week for the past month, then save one each month for the past year.

That way I have granual backups for anything recent, and the further back in the past you go the less frequent the backups are to save space

rsync from ZFS to an off-site unraid every 24 hours 5 times a week. on the sixth day it does a checksum based rsync which obviously means more stress so only do it once a week. the seventh day is reserved for ZFS scrubbing every two weeks.

Right now, I have a cron job set to run on Monday and Friday nights, is this too frequent?

Only you can answer this. How many days of data are you prepared to lose? What are the downsides of running your backup scripts more frequently?

Every hour, automatically

Never on my Laptop, because I'm too lazy to create a mechanism that detects when it's possible.

Backup all of my proxmox-LXCs/VMs to a proxmox backup server every night + sync these backups to another pbs in another town. A second proxmox backup every noon to my nas. (i know, 3-2-1 rule is not reached...)

I have

• Unraid back up it's USB
• Unraid appears gets backed up weekly by a community applications (CA app backup) and I use rclone to back it up to an old box account (100GB for life..) I did have it encrypted but seems I need to fix that..
• Parity drive on my Unraid (8TB)
• I am trying to understand how to use Rclone to back up my photos to Proton Drive so that's next.

Music and media is not too important yet but I would love some insight

Nextcloud data daily, same for the docker configs. Less important/rarely changing data once per week. Automatic sync to NAS and online storage. Irregular and manual sync to an external disk.

7 daily backups, 4 weekly backups, "infinite" monthly backups retained (until I clean them up by hand).

Boils down to how much are you willing to lose? Personally I do weekly

If you haven't tested your backups, you ain't got a backup.

I classify the data according to its importance (gold, silver, bronze, ephemeral). The regularity of the zfs snapshots (15 minutes to several hours) and their retention time (days to years) on the server depends on this. I then send the more important data that I cannot restore or can only restore with great effort (gold and silver) to another server once a day. For bronze, the zfs snapshots and a few days of storage time on the server are enough for me, as it is usually data that I can restore (build artifacts or similar) or is simply not that important. Ephemeral is for unimportant data such as caches or pipelines.

Local zfs snap every 5 mins.

Borg backups everything hour to 3 different locations.

I've blown away docker folders of config files a few times by accident. So far I've only had to dip into the zfs snaps to bring them back.

No backup for my media. Only redundacy.

For my nextcloud data, anytime i made major changes.

Assuming it is on: Daily

I have a cron job set to run on Monday and Friday nights, is this too frequent?

Only you can answer that - what is your risk tolerance for data loss?

Most backup software allow you to configure backup retention. I think I went with some pretty standard once per day for a week. After that they get deleted, and it keeps just one per week of the older ones, for one or two months. And after that it's down to monthly snapshots. I think that aligns well with what I need. Sometimes I find out something broke the day before yesterday. But I don't think I ever needed a backup from exactly the 12th of December or something like that. So I'm fine if they get more sparse after some time. And I don't need full backups more than necessary. An incremental backup will do unless there's some technical reason to do full ones.

But it entirely depends on the use-case. Maybe for a server or stuff you work on, you don't want to lose more than a day. While it can be perfectly alright to back up a laptop once a week. Especially if you save your documents in the cloud anyway. Or you're busy during the week and just mess with your server configuration on weekends. In that case you might be alright with taking a snapshot on fridays. Idk.

(And there are incremental backups, full backups, filesystem snapshots. On a desktop you could just use something like time machine... You can do different filesystems at different intervals...)

Weekly full backup, nightly incremental

Timeshift creates a btrfs snapshot on each boot for me. And my server gets nightly borg backups.

Daily toward all my three locations:

• local on the server
• in-house but on a different device
• offsite

But not all three destinations backup the same amount of data due to storage limitations.

I continuous backup important files/configurations to my NAS. That's about it.

IMO people who redundant/backup their media are insane... It's such an incredible waste of space. Having a robust media library is nice, but there's no reason you can't just start over if you have data corruption or something. I have TB and TB of media that I can redownload in a weekend if something happens (if I even want). No reason to waste backup space, IMO.