It’s World Backup Day, so let me remind you of the 3-2-1-1-0 rule:
What’s your backup solution of choice?
I use Borgmatic to store backups on my NAS and on a Hetzner Storagebox. I’ll go and check them right now.
See also last year’s post!
Things sure have changed, both in my desktops, and in my off-site backup strategy, since last year!
After talking more with @TheMM on stream, and growing more and more fed up with the cost and frustration of my backups in Duplicati not working out, I decided to migrate my off-site backups to Borgmatic, also targeting a Hetzner Storagebox. Borgmatic was very straightforward to get set up, although I do miss the Dashboard I had with Duplicati. However, the biggest thing that I wanted was notifications when Backups were successful and when they failed, and for that, I was able to combine additional solutions to serve my needs.
Borgmatic has the facilities to run commands depending on the state of backup jobs, which makes the world my oyster. I set up my self-hosted instance of Ntfy, and integrated the push notification service to receive up to the minute notifications on my phone, tablet, and desktop (via running the site as a PWA on my desktop). This has enabled me to worry less about needing to check my backup jobs (though it doesn’t remove the need for restore testing, although Borgmatic also has facilities to help here as well).
Workstation backups haven’t changed a lot, although I have not yet set up workstation backups on my new desktop. To be honest, I’m still not convinced that I’m going to stay on KDE Plasma, so I haven’t gotten to the point of setting up workstation backups. That said, part of my backup process on that machine is going to be more application backup oriented. One day ™ I’ll actually bear down and work through onboarding chezmoi so my dotfiles are backed up, syncing and applying appropriately across both macOS and Linux.
Great to see that you had a good time setting up Borgmatic, @belthesar!
Today, I did my weekly backup check and found that there wasn’t any for about a week. I think what happened was that a TrueNAS upgrade led to a dangling mount on the Borg LXC container that I use as my local backup target. This in turn caused the backup to hang indefinitely. And because it didn’t fully fail through, I didn’t get any notifications. In fact, the backup job was still hanging around doing nothing.
I’m happy that I set up those weekly checks; they usually take just a few minutes once a week and add a lot to my peace of mind.