Firstly, for my dotfiles, I use home-manager. I keep the config on my git server and in theory I can pull it down and set up a system the way I like it.

In terms of backups, I use Pika to backup my home directory to my hard disk every day, so I can, in theory, pull back files I delete.

I also push a core selection of my files to my server using Pika, just in case my house burns down. Likewise, I pull backups from my server to my desktop (again with Pika) in case Linode starts messing me about.

I also have a 2TiB ssd I keep in a strongbox and some cloud storage which I push bigger things to sporadically.

I also take occasional data exports from online services I use. Because hey, Google or Discord can ban you at any time for no reason. :P

Nightly rsync to two NAS boxes in the house (TrueNAS Scale and a Synology). Docs go in NextCloud, hosted on a VM in my basement, which is also backed up to the Synology by Proxmox. Also backing up my main machine (Pop!_OS) and my wife’s laptop (ThinkPad E595, also Pop!_OS) using Spideroak One.

Timeshift for the system, works perfectly, if you screw up the system, bad update for instance just start it, and you'll be back up running in less than ten minutes. Simple Cron backups for data, documents etc, just in case you delete a folder, document, image etc . Both of these options to a second internal HD

I leverage btrfs or ZFS snapshots. I take rolling system level snapshots on a schedule (daily, weekly, monthly and separately before any package upgrades or installs) and user data snapshots every couple of hours. Then I use btrbk to sync those snapshots to an external drive at least once a week. When I have all of my networking gear and home services setup I also sync all of this to storage on my NAS. Any hosts on the network keep rolling snapshots stored on the NAS as well.

Important data also gets shoveled into a B2 bucket and/or Google drive if I need to be able to access it from a phone.

I keep snapshots small by splitting data up into well defined subvolumes, anything that can be reacquired from the cloud (downloads, package caches, steam libraries, movies, music, etc) isn't included in the backup strategy. If I download something and it's hard to find or important I move it out of downloads and into a location that is covered by my backups.

restic to a local server and to cloud storage. it varies by device, but usually just everything in /home/. The rest of the operating system should be reproducible, whether through images, ansible, nix, or guix, given the information in /home/.

scheduling is done through systemd, usually (or the non-systemd equivalent). I use BackBlaze now, but I switch around occasionally. restic has policy based snapshot removal, and a prune option.

The only thing I use as a backup is a Live CD that's mounted to a USB thumb drive.

I used to use Timeshift but the one time I needed it, it didn't work for some reason. It also had a problem of making my PC temporarily unusable while it was making a backup, so I didn't enable it when I had to reinstall Linux Mint.

Main drive is a 1 1TB super fast m.2 device, backup drive is an 8TB platter drive with btrfs.

Bunch of scripts I wrote myself copy all important stuff to the platter drive every night using rsync, then makes a snapshot with current date. Since its all copy on write, i have daily backups for like 3 years now. Some extra scripts clean up some of the older backups, lowering the backup frequency to once a week after a year, once every 4 weeks after 2 years.

I have similar solutions for my servers where i rsync the backups over the Internet.

I use Bluebuild to create a reproducible system, plus a post-install script to handle other post-install tasks such as setting up initial preferences.

Also Vorta to backup files and settings to external HD, plus OneDrive Linux client to sync files and settings to cloud.

I use syncthing to sync almost everything across my computer, laptop (occasional usage), server (RAID1), old laptop (powered up once every month or so), and a few other devices (that only get a small subset of my data, though). On the computer, laptop, and server, I have btrfs snapshots (snapper). Overall, this works very well, I always have 4+ copies of my data in 2+ geographical locations.

Pika Backup for /home/ to an external drive. It's an automatic solution with a simple GUI that serves as a front end to Borg iirc. Lets you easily browse and mount old backups. Anything outside of my actual personal files can be recreated or restored trivially, so I don't care to back them up.

I also have a manual dump of /etc/ but i change it so infrequently that it doesn't really need looking after.

Software & Services:

• Restic client
• Restic REST server
• https://github.com/rbuchberger/res-man + systemd timers or cron to configure & run restic nightly
• healthchecks.io for monitoring
• ntfy.sh for notifications

Destinations:

• Local raspberry pi with external hdd, running restic REST server
• RAID 1 NAS at parents' house, connected via tailscale, also running restic REST

I've been meaning to set up a drive rotation for the local backup so I always have one offline in case of ransomware, but I haven't gotten to it.

Edit: For the backup set I back up pretty much everything. I'm not paying per gig, though.

.dotfiles on github

Big/critical files on an external HD

simple as

I have my important folders synced to my Nextcloud and create nightly snapshots of that to a different drive using borg.

One thing I still need to do, is offsite encrypted backups using rsync.

All of my servers make local dumps of their databases and config files to directories owned by unprivileged users. This includes file paths, permissions, and ownerships (so I know how to put them back).

My primary research server at home uses rsync to pull copies of those local backups from my servers.

My primary research server uses Restic to make a daily incremental backup to Backblaze's B2 service.

For my home server, I use Restic and a cronjob to weekly take snapshots of all my services. It then gets synced to a Backblaze B2 bucket (at $6/TB/mo). It's pretty neat, only saving the difference between the previous and current snapshot, removes older snapshots, and encrypts everything.

restic -> Wasabi, automated with shell script and cron. Uses an include list to tell it what paths to back up.

Script has Pushover credentials to send me backup alerts. Parses restic log to tell me how much was backed up, removed, success/failure of backup, and current repo size.

To be added: a periodic restore of a random file to have its hash compared to the current version of the file (will happen right after backup, unlikely to have changed in my workload), which will be subsequently deleted, and alert sent letting me know how the restore test went.

I sync important files to s3 from a folder with awscli. Dot files and projects are in a private git repos. That's it.

If I maintained a server, I would do something more sophisticated, but installation is so dead simple these days that I could get a daily driver in working order very quickly.

If I feel like it, I might use DD to clone my drive and put in on a hard drive. Usually I don't back up, though.

You have loads of options but you need to also start from ... "what if". Work out how important your data really is. Take another look and ask the kids and others if they give a toss. You might find that no one cares about your photo collection in which case if your phone dies ... who cares? If you do care then sync them to a PC or laptop.

Perhaps take a look at this - https://www.veeam.com/products/free/linux.html its free for a few systems.

Dotfiles are handled by GNU Stow and git. I have this on all my devices.

Projects like in git.

Media is periodically rsynced from my server to an external drive.

Been meaning to put all my docker-composes into git as well...

I don't back up too much else.

Pendrive for the important stuff, paper for the really important stuff and brain for everything else.

For system files/configuration on my machines, timeshift set to run once a week.

For family photos and shared files, I built a pair of SFTP servers made from old HP thin-client PCs at two different geographic locations which automatically sync to each other once a day via cron job using vsftpd and lftp. Each one has both an NVMe and SATA SSD which run in a software RAID 1 configuration.

For any other files, a second local server also using vsftpd and two SSDs in USB enclosures. I manually back them up using rsync on an irregular basis.

My backup is begging my computer to implode so I can experience the sweet relief of getting offline.

But also I use external discs and make copies of important files I can't recreate. Don't care too much about config as I am happy enough to distro hop and set things up anew.

Timeshift for configs to a locally attached drive. Home partition to cloud with rsync