Basically title. I’m in the process of setting up a proper backup for my configured containers on Unraid and I’m wondering how often I should run my backup script. Right now, I have a cron job set to run on Monday and Friday nights, is this too frequent? Whats your schedule and do you strictly backup your appdata (container configs), or is there other data you include in your backups?
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.
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…)
@Sunny Backups are done weekly, using Restic (and with ‘–read-data-subset=9%’ to verify that the backup data is still valid).
But that’s also in addition to doing nightly Snapraid syncs for larger media, and Syncthing for photos & documents (which means I have copies on 2+ machines).
Weekly full backup, nightly incremental
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.
Try ZFS send if you have ZFS on the other side. It’s insane. No file IO, just snap and time for the network transfer of the delta.
I would but the other side isn’t zfs so I went with borg instead
If you haven’t tested your backups, you ain’t got a backup.
Using Kopia, backups are made multiple times per day to Google drive. Only changes are transferred.
Configurations are backed up once per week and manually, stored 4 weeks. Websites and NextCloud data is backed up every hour and stored for a year (although I’m doing this only 7 months now).
Kopia is magic, recommended!
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.
Assuming it is on: Daily
Depends on the application. I run a nightly backup of a few VM’s because realistically they dont change much. I have containers on the other hand that run critical (to me) systems like my photo backup and they are backed up twice a day.
No backup for my media. Only redundacy.
For my nextcloud data, anytime i made major changes.
Longest interval is every 24 hours. With some more frequent like every 6 hours or so, like the ones for my game servers.
I have multiple backups (3-2-1 rule), 1 is just important stuff as a file backup, the other is a full bootable system image of everything.
With proper backup software incremental backups don’t use any more space unless files are changed, so no real downside to more frequent backups.
I do not as I cannot afford the extra storage required to do so.
Daily backups. Currently using restic on my NixOS servers. To avoid data corruption, I make a zfs snapshot at 2am, and after that restic does a backup of my mutable data dirs both to my local Nas and CloudFlare r3. The Nas backup folder is synced to backblaze nightly as well for a more cold store.
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