How often do you back up?

I was wondering how often does one choose to make and keep back ups. I know that “It depends on your business needs”, but that is rather vague and unsatisfying, so I was hoping to hear some heuristics from the community. Like say I had a workstation/desktop that is acting as a server at a shop (taking inventory / sales receipts) and would be using something like timeshift to keep snapshots. I feel like keeping two daily and a weekly would be alright for a store, since the two most recent would not be too old or something. I also feel like using the hourly snapshots would be too taxing on a CPU and might be using to much disk space.

Dehydrated,

Never

lemmyvore,

I have autocron jobs that sync various server directories to a daily backup (on the same server), then sync that backup once a week to the weekly backup, and once a month take a tarball snapshot of the weekly backup.

Every once in a while I plug in a HDD on USB and take a Borg backup of the monthly dir. Borg does compression and deduplication (and encryption if you want to). I should be doing this also once a week but sometimes I’m lazy and leave a few weeks between them.

eskuero,
@eskuero@lemmy.fromshado.ws avatar

Daily, usually keeping only the last week or so

KpntAutismus,

didn’t have money for an external hard drive or anything like that growing up, so a lot of stuff got lost over the years. but when i upgrade my NAS’ hard drive i will buy an enclosure and scrape all of the important stuff together. like recovery codes for my 3ds collection, old photos of my late cat. that kinda stuff. then i’ll see how frequently i’m gonna update the data.

lemmyvore,

Se if you can get a DVD or Blu-ray writer and backup stuff to DVD or Blu-ray discs. If you keep the discs in individual jewel cases or in a disc wallet they keep very well.

ShortN0te,

When you use deduplication on the backup side you can do backups every minute without needing much storage. When the backup programm looks at the filesystem to determine which file has changed, the CPU only need to process the changed files.

For my personal devices i do daily backups. There is not enough change every day.

Appoxo,
@Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

My PC: Every day and when it is online
My drives the backups go to: Once a week.

henfredemars,

I still have drawings I made in MS Paint on Windows 95 when it had just come out, my first text document, and the first report I ever typed in grade school.

Btrfs snapshots of the root volume in RAID1 configuration with 8 hourly, 7 daily, 3 weekly, and automated rsync backups to NAS, with primary and secondary offsite, physically disconnected backups stored in sealed, airtight, and waterproof containers at two different banks prepaid storage and with advanced directive in the event of my demise.

Bit of a hobby really. I acknowledge it’s completely unnecessary. I don’t like to lose data.

Dave,
@Dave@lemmy.nz avatar

Sealed, airtight, and waterproof but what if both banks burn down at the same time? You didn’t mention fire-proof.

Appoxo,
@Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

You are backed up better than some enterprises…

Just wow.

bitwaba,

How often do you update your off-site backups?

computergeek125,

I’m probably the overkill case because I have AD+vC and a ton of VMs.

RPO 24H for main desktop and critical VMs like vCenter, domain controllers, DHCP, DNS, Unifi controller, etc.

Twice a week for laptops and remote desktop target VMs

Once a week for everything else.

Backups are kept: (may be plus or minus a bit)

  • Daily backups for a week
  • Weekly backups for a month
  • Monthly backups for a year
  • Yearly backups for 2-3y

The software I have (Synology Active Backup) captures data using incremental backups where possible, but if it loses its incremental marker (system restore in windows, change-block tracking in VMware, rsync for file servers), it will generate a full backup and deduplicate (iirc).

From the many times this has saved me from various bad things happening for various reasons, I want to say the RTO is about 2-6h for a VM to restore and 18 for a desktop to restore from the point at which I decide to go back to a backup.

Right now my main limitation is my poor quad core Synology is running a little hot on the CPU front, so some of those have farther apart RPOs than I’d like.

sep,

How often depends on how much work it is to recreate, or the consequences of loosing data.

Some systems do not have real data locally, get a backup every week. Most get a nightly backup. Some with a high rate of change , get a lunch/middle of the workday run.
Some have hourly backups/snapshots, where recreating data is impossible. CriticL databases have hourly + transaction log streaming offsite.

How long to keep a history depends on how likely an error can go unnoticed but minimum 14 days. Most have 10 dailes + 5 weeky + 6 monthly + 1 yearly.

If you have paper recipes and can recreate data lost easily. Daily seems fine.

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