Currently I'm just using bare rclone to backup to my own remote machines, but obviously this isn't very professional solution. Was thinking to add Backblaze B2 as a remote, but I guess using rclone wouldn't be a state-of-the-art solution here. After all, it isn't really a backup tool, is it? It has some built-in encryption, but it's a bit clunky, and I'd think a proper backup tool should automatically divide data into blocks of suitable size (instead of just creating file-per-file - to make it S3/B2 API-friendly), encode whole directories as tar (if needed to preserve links, for example), do deduplication, and whatever else are best practices I have no idea about, but which backup-proficient people probably invented long time ago.
Does anybody have a recommendation?
I briefly looked at restic and duplicati, but surprisingly none are as simple to use as I'd expect a dedicated backup-tool to be (I don't need, and kindda don't want GUI, I'd like all configuration to be stored in a single config-file I can just back-up to a different location like everything else, and re-create on any new machine). More than that, I've read some scary stories about these tools fucking up their indexes so that data turns out to be non-restorable, which sounds insane, since this is something you must be absolutely sure your backup-tool would never do no matter what, because what's even the point of making backups then.
BorgBackup user here and really happy. It was a set and forget for me and after 7 years, the deduplicated backup is still working flawlessly each week. I recommend pairing it with borgmatic [1], which helps to design away some of the complexities of the underlying borg backup.
Or, if you're using a desktop environment and prefer a GUI, Vorta has been treating me well.
> set and forget for me and after 7 years
Please tell me you verify your backups now and then?
It's kind of ridiculous that there is better tooling for Kubernetes to sync files two ways than there is for the Linux desktop. Rclone is a maze of options, which vary based on version/distro. The configurator is a slow readline console script without enough information. The one decent GUI for Rclone has been abandoned, and despite being able to save "tasks", had no ability to just... schedule one every 10 minutes. And yet if you go into most distros and look at packaged Internet apps, or things on Flatpak, you will find 1,000 different open source GUIs for an RSS reader, BitTorrent client, or chat client.
I would love it if there were some kind of "Linux Desktop co-op", with a couple of staff. Users pay membership dues, vote on apps/features, and some devs get paid to develop it, in addition to "resume fame" that can translate over to a higher paying gig. But something tells me the Linux Desktop is so small and nerd-focused that we'd just end up funding more RSS readers and chat clients.
I'm not sure what you're on about. This started as a rant on rclone's CLI options, but ended on desktop Linux.
rclone is mostly the work of one guy. You can donate to him if you'd like. Better yet, you can submit a PR? Making a GUI for a complex, rapidly evolving CLI is not an easy thing to do.
Syncthing?
If you're looking for cheap online storage for your backups know this: A Microsoft 365 Single subscription comes with 1 TB of OneDrive space (Family subscriptions with 1 TB per person).
I've been using it with restic + rclone successfully for years. It's not very fast, but works.
Oh very interesting. This has been a requested feature for a while especially with the rise in popularity and the decreased cost of object storage.
Borg working with object storage was not supported though some people did use it that way. From my understanding, most would duplicate a repo and upload instead of borg directly writing/manipulating it. This could problematic if the original repo was corrupt as now the corruption would be duplicated. So this will make things much easier and allow for a more streamlined workflow. Having the tool support rclone instead of specific services seems like a wise and more future-proof choice to me.
is there a reason to use the borg encryption[1] over rclone crypt[2] or vise versa?
1. https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/2.0.0b11/quickstart.htm... 2. https://rclone.org/crypt/
Rclone crypt is not much related to Borg. That’s a tool for copying files from one machine to another, in this case encrypting before copying. That’s rsync, working with cloud.
Borg is a different tool, for backup. It deduplicates, encrypts, snapshots, checksums, compresses, … source directories into a single repository. It doesn’t work with files, rather blocks of data. It includes commands for repository management, like searching data, pruning or merging snapshots, etc. You will then transfer or sync the repository to wherever you want, with a tool such as rsync/SSH or rclone. Rclone is now natively supported, so that you don’t need to store the repository locally and on remote, rather back up directly to remote.
I would also wonder what the difference between this package and Restic is. as far as efficiency and encryption.
How good at deduping is this when encryption is enabled? I was looking at rsync.net and it killed me that they don't support encryption in a sane way.
It's very sane: encrypt the bits, then send it to the host.
Curious what you think is not right with their methods.
> they don't support encryption in a sane way.
Should the storage provider provide support for encryption on their end? Would you not want to store the keys locally?
The lack of s3-like remotes support was the reason I switched from borg to restic
rclone has dedupe, I think it does what restic can do plus multiple cloud support.
rclone crypt also does encryption.
so far I think rclone has it all for me.
Rclone doesn’t have deduplication. That’s just finding files with the same name. It’s different from deduplication used in backup software.
Think of grinding data in a big machine, and removing blocks that are redundant. You may have every file to be a single copy, and get significant space reduction.
They also work together. restic uses rclone for backends other than the officially supported 7. rclone also has built-in restic integration.
rclone on it own is a syncing solution not backup.
Restic also offers encryption and compression. That’s the selling point for me when dealing with dozens of TB
I quite like Borg, others worth checking out are Restic and Kopia. Restic didnt have a UI for a long time, not sure thats changed...
Nope. No configuration file either. But they added compression recently.
autorestic or resticprofile fill the gap well. Backrest does UI.
Backrest looks like a great find.
Interesting. How robust is it in practice?
I've been using Duplicacy for a long while, and I've been pretty happy with it. But I'd love to switch to a full open-source solution (Duplicacy is proprietary with sources publically available).
It wasn't recommended a bit ago to use Borg 2.0 because it wasn't baked enough. Has that changed? Are people using Borg 2?
It is still in beta, and has been in this state for a long time. At some point, the developer thought to delay it further and introduce whatever breaking changes are needed in this release.
Note that if you use, say, the 2.11 version, you cannot upgrade to 2.12, you cannot go back to 1.X either. People like me were stuck, it turned out you have to discard the repo. Sometime later they better clarified this point:
>> Borg2 is currently in beta testing and might get major and/or breaking changes between beta releases (and there is no beta to next-beta upgrade code, so you will have to delete and re-create repos).
I have a 2.X repo. It’s working fine and backs up. I have a lot of snapshots in that repo. If someone knows how to transfer them to a 2.X version once it’s out of beta, let me know.
Author calls that out right at the top of the changelog:
> Beta releases are only for testing on NEW repos - do not use for production.