backup.md

Today 2021-03-02: I tried using restic to generate backups (perhaps frequently) on my Ubuntu 20.04 laptop. I used a command like that below.

# install
brew install restic

# initialize the repo
restic init -r Backup/home

# perform a backup; I did this a few times for testing
restic backup -x -r Backup/home --exclude Downloads --exclude .cache --exclude Backup/home --exclude .config/Nika/backups /home/drasch

Upon doing so, using version 0.12.0, it became clear that it only takes a few minutes (after the first time a 24min backup of about 160G of data) to generate an incremental backup. If I limit the backup just to a directory of code, or something like that, it goes even faster.

Note 1: I didn't remember, but you should know that restic does NOT compress backups.

Note 2: On the upside, restic could back up to local pc OR could back up to any dumb-file storage remotely. (As compared with borg which requires a borg server on the other end).

Note 3: Another way I could do this would be to use Syncthing with a one-way sync to a server and save old versions, or generate a backup on the server. The nice thing is that Syncthing would do file monitoring. The downside is that it might not always sync well. I've got old backups of AeroFS repos that aren't good because git is a bad thing to use through dropbox or similar.

Note 4: Is this an important problem? Or do my weekly backups suffice? This would mainly protect against losing my own work by overwriting, running an errant command, or other tomfoolery.

Other links:

• Timeshift is oriented more to system backups, but it can use things like btrfs snapshots which would be an awesome way to generate incremental backups on my laptop.
• Back in Time