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.

Appoxo,
@Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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

69420,

Wait, so you backup your backups? Why not just 2 backups of the same thing?

Appoxo,
@Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Limitation of hardware.
It is essentially just a file copy.

Dehydrated,

Never

werefreeatlast,

I back up every morning to get to work and every afternoon to get back home lol

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.

henfredemars,

You got me there! Not fireproof. In that case I’m just hoping that having two off-site backups at different locations has me covered, but that’s a good idea. I should consider fireproof foil.

Appoxo,
@Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

You are backed up better than some enterprises…

Just wow.

henfredemars,

Another perspective is data hoarding.

I have system images of machines of relatives who have died. Many of the photos that I have retained are the only ones. However, that was more an emergent utility than a motivating one.

bitwaba,

How often do you update your off-site backups?

henfredemars,

Monthly, alternating locations.

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.

bier,

stroj task runs daily the initial sync took forever tho because I only have 5MB UP connection

refreeze, (edited )
@refreeze@lemmy.world avatar

Every hour via Restic to a local Mino instance on my NAS. Once a day to backblaze B2. Once a week to an offline HDD in my fire safe.

Keep in mind the more often you backup the less total time each backup should take to run. If your backup software isn’t too heavy to run and stores backups incrementally, there is little penalty to frequent backups.

z00s, (edited )

Whenever I’ve gone too far forwards

Rootiest, (edited )
@Rootiest@lemmy.world avatar

It depends what I’m backing up and where it’s backing up to.

I do local/lan backups at a much higher rate because there’s more bandwidth to spare and effectively free storage. So for those as often as every 10 mins if there are changes to back up.

For less critical things and/or cloud backups I have a less frequent schedule as losing more time on those is less critical and it costs more to store on the cloud.

I use Kopia for backups on all my servers and desktop/laptop.

I’ve been very happy with it, it’s FOSS and it saved my ass when Windows Update corrupted my bitlocker disk and I lost everything. That was also the last straw that put me on Linux full-time.

ebits21,
@ebits21@lemmy.ca avatar

5 minutes after every computer boot to a NAS. Then nightly from the NAS to the cloud.

vegetaaaaaaa, (edited )
@vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world avatar

7 daily backups, 4 weekly backups, 6 monthly backups (incremental, using rsnapshot). The latest weekly backup is also copied to an offline/offsite drive.

BCsven,

There should be a whitepaper you can reference based on sales scenario. As others have said hourly, daily, weekly snapshots are not backups, unless you also have a btrfs or zfs send that IS backing up the snapshots to another remote device

krash,

Like you said, “it depends” 😁

I have a huge datablob that I mirror off-site once monthly. I have a few services that provides things for my family, I take a backup of them nightly (and run a “backup-restoration” scenario every six months). For my desktop, none at all - but I have my most critical data synched / documented so they can be restored to a functional state.

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

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.

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