Basically title. I’m in the process of setting up a proper backup for my configured containers on Unraid and I’m wondering how often I should run my backup script. Right now, I have a cron job set to run on Monday and Friday nights, is this too frequent? Whats your schedule and do you strictly backup your appdata (container configs), or is there other data you include in your backups?
I run Borg nightly, backing up the majority of the data on my boot disk, incl docker volumes and config + a few extra folders.
Each individual archive is around 550gb, but because of the de-duplication and compression it’s only ~800mb of new data each day taking around 3min to complete the backup.
Borgs de-duplication is honestly incredible. I keep 7 daily backups, 3 weekly, 11 monthly, then one for each year beyond that. The 21 historical backups I have right now RAW would be 10.98tb of data. After de-duplication and compression it only takes up 407.98gb on disk.
With that kind of space savings, I see no reason not to keep such frequent backups. Hell, the whole archive takes up less space than one copy of the original data.
Proxmox servers are mirrored zpools, not that RAID is a backup. Replication between Proxmox servers every 15 minutes for HA guests, hourly for less critical guests. Full backups with PBS at 5AM and 7PM, 2 sets apiece with one set that goes off site and is rotated weekly. Differential replication every day to zfs.rent. I keep 30 dailies, 12 weeklys, 24 monthly and infinite annuals.
Periodic test restores of all backups at various granularities at least monthly or whenever I’m bored or fuck something up.
This is very similar to how I run mine, except that I use Ceph instead of ZFS. Nightly backups of the CephFS data with Duplicati, followed by staggered nightly backups for all VMs and containers to a PBS VM on a the NAS. File backups from unraid get sent up to CrashPlan.
Slightly fewer retention points to cut down on overall storage, and a similar test pattern.
I would like to play with ceph but I don’t have a lot of spare equipment anymore, and I understand ZFS pretty well, and trust it. Maybe the next cluster upgrade if I ever do another one.
And I have an almost unhealthy paranoia after see so many shitshows in my career, so having a pile of copies just helps me sleep at night. The day I have to delve into the last layer is the day I build another layer, but that hasn’t happened recently. PBS dedup is pretty damn good so it’s not much extra to keep a lot of copies.
Yep. Even if the data I’m backing up doesn’t really change that often. Perhapas I should start to back up files from my laptop and workstation too. Nothing too important is stored only on those devices, but reinstalling and reconfiguring everything back is a bit of a chore.
Most backup software allow you to configure backup retention. I think I went with some pretty standard once per day for a week. After that they get deleted, and it keeps just one per week of the older ones, for one or two months. And after that it’s down to monthly snapshots. I think that aligns well with what I need. Sometimes I find out something broke the day before yesterday. But I don’t think I ever needed a backup from exactly the 12th of December or something like that. So I’m fine if they get more sparse after some time. And I don’t need full backups more than necessary. An incremental backup will do unless there’s some technical reason to do full ones.
But it entirely depends on the use-case. Maybe for a server or stuff you work on, you don’t want to lose more than a day. While it can be perfectly alright to back up a laptop once a week. Especially if you save your documents in the cloud anyway. Or you’re busy during the week and just mess with your server configuration on weekends. In that case you might be alright with taking a snapshot on fridays. Idk.
(And there are incremental backups, full backups, filesystem snapshots. On a desktop you could just use something like time machine… You can do different filesystems at different intervals…)
Using Kopia, backups are made multiple times per day to Google drive. Only changes are transferred.
Configurations are backed up once per week and manually, stored 4 weeks. Websites and NextCloud data is backed up every hour and stored for a year (although I’m doing this only 7 months now).
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I’m always backing up with SyncThing in realtime, but every week I do an off-site type of tarball backup that isn’t within the SyncThing setup.
I do not as I cannot afford the extra storage required to do so.
I run Borg nightly, backing up the majority of the data on my boot disk, incl docker volumes and config + a few extra folders.
Each individual archive is around 550gb, but because of the de-duplication and compression it’s only ~800mb of new data each day taking around 3min to complete the backup.
Borgs de-duplication is honestly incredible. I keep 7 daily backups, 3 weekly, 11 monthly, then one for each year beyond that. The 21 historical backups I have right now RAW would be 10.98tb of data. After de-duplication and compression it only takes up 407.98gb on disk.
With that kind of space savings, I see no reason not to keep such frequent backups. Hell, the whole archive takes up less space than one copy of the original data.
+1 for borg
This archive: 602.47 GB 569.64 GB 15.68 MB All archives: 16.33 TB 15.45 TB 607.71 GB
Chunk index: 2703719 18695670
Thanks for sharing the details on this, very interesting!
Proxmox servers are mirrored zpools, not that RAID is a backup. Replication between Proxmox servers every 15 minutes for HA guests, hourly for less critical guests. Full backups with PBS at 5AM and 7PM, 2 sets apiece with one set that goes off site and is rotated weekly. Differential replication every day to zfs.rent. I keep 30 dailies, 12 weeklys, 24 monthly and infinite annuals.
Periodic test restores of all backups at various granularities at least monthly or whenever I’m bored or fuck something up.
Yes, former sysadmin.
This is very similar to how I run mine, except that I use Ceph instead of ZFS. Nightly backups of the CephFS data with Duplicati, followed by staggered nightly backups for all VMs and containers to a PBS VM on a the NAS. File backups from unraid get sent up to CrashPlan.
Slightly fewer retention points to cut down on overall storage, and a similar test pattern.
Yes, current sysadmin.
I would like to play with ceph but I don’t have a lot of spare equipment anymore, and I understand ZFS pretty well, and trust it. Maybe the next cluster upgrade if I ever do another one.
And I have an almost unhealthy paranoia after see so many shitshows in my career, so having a pile of copies just helps me sleep at night. The day I have to delve into the last layer is the day I build another layer, but that hasn’t happened recently. PBS dedup is pretty damn good so it’s not much extra to keep a lot of copies.
Once every 24 hours.
Yep. Even if the data I’m backing up doesn’t really change that often. Perhapas I should start to back up files from my laptop and workstation too. Nothing too important is stored only on those devices, but reinstalling and reconfiguring everything back is a bit of a chore.
Daily backups here. Storage is cheap. Losing data is not.
I use Duplicati for my backups, and have backup retention set up like this:
Save one backup each day for the past week, then save one each week for the past month, then save one each month for the past year.
That way I have granual backups for anything recent, and the further back in the past you go the less frequent the backups are to save space
Backups???
Raid is a backup.
That is what the B in RAID stands for.
What’s the second B stand for?
Beets.
Or bears.
Or buttsex.
It’s context dependent, like “cool”.
cool
🤣
Just like the “s” in IoT stands for “security”
If Raid is backup, then Unraid is?
Depends on the system but weekly at least
Only you can answer that - what is your risk tolerance for data loss?
Most backup software allow you to configure backup retention. I think I went with some pretty standard once per day for a week. After that they get deleted, and it keeps just one per week of the older ones, for one or two months. And after that it’s down to monthly snapshots. I think that aligns well with what I need. Sometimes I find out something broke the day before yesterday. But I don’t think I ever needed a backup from exactly the 12th of December or something like that. So I’m fine if they get more sparse after some time. And I don’t need full backups more than necessary. An incremental backup will do unless there’s some technical reason to do full ones.
But it entirely depends on the use-case. Maybe for a server or stuff you work on, you don’t want to lose more than a day. While it can be perfectly alright to back up a laptop once a week. Especially if you save your documents in the cloud anyway. Or you’re busy during the week and just mess with your server configuration on weekends. In that case you might be alright with taking a snapshot on fridays. Idk.
(And there are incremental backups, full backups, filesystem snapshots. On a desktop you could just use something like time machine… You can do different filesystems at different intervals…)
Every hour, automatically
Never on my Laptop, because I’m too lazy to create a mechanism that detects when it’s possible.
I just tell it to back up my laptops every hour anyway. If it’s not on, it just doesn’t happen, but it’s generally on enough to capture what I need.
Thanks for reminding me to validate.
Daily here also.
Using Kopia, backups are made multiple times per day to Google drive. Only changes are transferred.
Configurations are backed up once per week and manually, stored 4 weeks. Websites and NextCloud data is backed up every hour and stored for a year (although I’m doing this only 7 months now).
Kopia is magic, recommended!
Boils down to how much are you willing to lose? Personally I do weekly