Backing Things Up

/u/bigheadsmith just asked on Reddit about good solutions for local and remote backups for home PCs – so I offered an outline of my current backup regime.

Only a couple of responses so far, but suggestions seem to converge around rclone and restic being good solutions on Linux. Restic also received a lot of enthusiastic support on a recent-ish Hacker News post, with some users saying they’d switched to restic from borg.

If you’re on Ubuntu, a downside of restic is that the versions of it in the Ubuntu LTSs lag terribly behind upstream. My solution is to cobble together quick-and-dirty .deb files that include recent fixes – that way, I can still easily track what’s been installed where with dpkg and apt. I do also now have the onus of keeping up to date with upstream myself, but luckily, restic doesn’t seem to have new versions released all that frequently. Thus, I’ve got a quick-and-dirty .deb version of restic on GitHub, and a friendly fork of backupninja with recent bug fixes applied.