Offsite Backups

Yeah, my OP was badly worded … I do this method - the backup location pulls from the local location.

Someone elsewhere mentioned Borg … looking closer at that at the moment.

I have used borg in the past it worked pretty nicely but i was using it on the hetzner platform and not for huge amounts of data so can’t confirm it’s awesome.

1 Like

I am looking at about 30gb total from 4 different sources … not sure if that qualifies as ‘huge amount of data’ or not.

30gb is ridiculously small, just grab a lowend VPS.

Right, that is the intention … actually already done - but the question is what is the best way to get the data encrypted and transferred to the vps with the least amount of effort. :slight_smile:

Restic is another option, works good for me for the past couple years.

3 Likes

In my book, it’s awesome. It’s my main tool for off-site backups pretty much everywhere and I had no nasty surprises for quite a few years.

3 Likes

I am using Veeam Backup & Replication for this purpose. You can get an NFR license for free and set up a Scale-Out Repository to automatically push completed backups to the cloud. It’s great!

1 Like

NFR expires after 1 year. listed prices are so high. looks like their target audience are high profile customers only.

I wonder if you can switch to the community edition after that 1 year.

OP I personally use Borgbackup for Linux to do both block images and normal file/incremental backups.
I use duplicity on Windows machines for compatibility

1 Like

NFR licenses can be renewed indefinitely.

If your license expires, the installation will automatically be switched to the Community Edition (which also works quite well, but does not support Scale-Out Repositories).

Finally, the upfront cost of Veeam may seem high, but I think $400/year is quite cheap, compared to the cost of a catastrophic data loss incident - especially as a hosting provider.

After many years of using borg(backup) I’ve been switching to restic, for a reliable all-in-on solution that is great.

1 Like

We are the Borg. Restic is futile!:stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like

1 Like

The first thing with borg is that it’s python. The good thing is, it’s a single binary cython, but restic is a single binary go; I’ve found python software more iffy in general.
Then, restic supports a huge amount of backends out-of-the-box.
And restic encrypts by default (though borg can also do encrypted).

Restic is dope

2 Likes

Are you looking only for opensource solutions or you may consider cheap/commercial which do the job seamlessly?

The budget is open source … but if it works great, is inexpensive and makes life much easier, then yes, commercial products will be considered. :slight_smile:

I know that restic is another great alternative, many preferences for this or that software are determined by how much you are used to work with it.
Not sure what’s wrong with python, or cython; about encryption, borg actually encrypts per default (you have to opt-out explicitly with borg init --encryption=none); borg also conveniently compresses (using zstd too) & dedups very, very efficiently. Comparisons between the two have been considered in various places, even on the restic forum itself where some possible advantages of borg are analysed. Some borg functionalities have been discussed in previous threads here as well
Both are good and preference is eventually pretty personal. About “OOB” readiness: wrappers are available for borg but hey this is hostballs hostedtalk after all :wink: so I suppose some people hanging around here isn’t reluctant to get their hands… dirty

1 Like

I am using borg for backing up users’ Maildir files. Roughly several tens of GB but many tens of thousands of files. Things I like about borg is that it is really fast at finding changes and de-dupe. For an incremental on this quantity, maybe around 10-20 seconds to scan, dedupe, compress/encrypt, and upload to backend.

The excerpt I showed in the above-mentioned previous thread was taken from a mail server as well :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like