Backup ideas

[Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net>]

Hello,

On Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 08:52:05PM -0400, Default User wrote:

[vast mounts of quoted text snipped - please don't quote too much!]
> So, in backing up my home partition, is use:
> 
> sudo rsync -avvzHAXPish --delete /home/default
> /media/default/USBHD005/Backup_of_home_directory_of_Dell_Debian_dimwit
> 
> to backup my home directory to an external (local) usb hdd.

Note that unless you regularly store this HDD somewhere else, it
isn't a great backup.

Your home could, for example, burn down, or if you are a victim of
theft they will probably take any attached drives also.

A remote or off-site backup would be better.

> Good? Bad? Indifferent?
> Comments welcome. Especially on the rsync command syntax.

An issue with your backup methodology is that you only get one copy
of your data: whatever was most recent at the time that the command
ran.

The most common form of data loss is human error: you delete
something or alter something, and need to get back what you had
before.

With your current method you are relying on spotting that issue
before your next backup runs, because once your next backup runs it
will overwrite the existing backup.

Your scheme could be improved by keeping more history.

It doesn't look like you are encrypting your backups. Maybe you are
and this just wasn't evident in the information that you supplied.
If you aren't doing so, it would be a good idea to encrypt your
source files and your backups so that if someone steals the external
HDD then the data will be useless to them.

There are many different backup solutions, with different strengths
and weaknesses. I would suggest first looking into a way of keeping
some amount of history, secondly to work out how to get an off-site
or remote backup, and thirdly to look at how you can keep encrypted
backups.

Something like restic backup is a very good all around solution.

You could consider backing up to a cloud like Amazon S3. Using the
Infrequent Access or Glacier storage classes you can store 100s of
gigabytes of data for just a few US cents per day. There are many
different backup solutions that support clouds like these.

Cheers,
Andy

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