Re: Backup Times on a Linux desktop
Konstantin Nebel writes:
this is basically a question, what you guys prefer and do. I have a Linux
destkop and recently I decided to buy a raspberry pi 4 (great device) and
[...]
Now i attached a 4 tb drive to my pi and I decided what the heck, why not
doing backups now.
So now I am thinking. How should I approach backups. On windows it does
magically backups and remind me when they didnt run for a while. I like that
attitude.
[...]
So I could do the backup on logout for example but I am not sure if that is
not annoying so I'd like to have your opinion. Oh and yeah. I like to turn
[...]
Whoever read till the end Im thankful and ready to hear your opinion.
[...]
My opinion on the matter is this: Go for a good (fast) tool and trigger it
often :) Borg has been mentioned and might be very good (I wrote my backup
tool myself but that is probably less good :) )
About the times of triggering: For me (also as a "Desktop" user of sorts), I
actually do a variant of backup on logout which is actually "backup before
shutdown". I do it by using a custom script called `mahalt` which I invoke
to shutdown my computer. Before triggering the actual shutdown, it invokes
the backup procedure.
As a "Laptop" user (current situation), I can really not be sure that I will
have the time to await the backup (on my "Desktop" it takes about 2 minutes
or so which is really acceptable for shutdown). Thus for the "Laptop" usage,
I trigger backup manually once per day (usually as the last action of the
day's computer usage) and it runs slightly faster because everything is on
SSD.
If that triggering intervals are good for you also depends on the amount of
data. If it is much (as per >50 GiB or so), the detection of changed files
(even with good tools) will take some considerable amount of time and thus a
"more rare" triggering interval might be good. Still, triggering it entirely
in background (so as to have enough "time" for the backup) should be
considered with extreme care, because unexpectedly triggered backups can not
only impair system performance but also backup an "inconsistent" state of
sorts (e.g. opened files or partial directory structures if large parts of
the structure are just being copied/renamed etc.).
Btw. as I am paranoid when it comes to backups I always do multi-level
backup: The first copy is on the very same computer's HDD (same for
Laptop/Desktop), the second copy goes to a "mini" computer similar to
Raspberry Pi. Then for the "Desktop" I usually have all HDDs on RAID1 and
the "mini" computer synchronizes to an online file storage service. For the
"Laptop" I sync to the "mini" computer and to a separate SD card (via rsync
at the moment and also triggered manually once per day). In any case, at
least one of the storage locations is offsite...
HTH
Linux-Fan
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