My backup process

My backup flow adheres to these principles:

• Stick to rule 3-2-1
• Snapshot important folders forever
• Use untrusted remote repositories to store encrypted backups off-site

Here is how it is implemented.

There are three personal folders on my laptop:

• ~/keep - all the documents that I should keep forever;
• ~/hoard videos, whitepapers, podcast episodes and the other stuff I want to keep forever;
• ~/Dropbox - similar to keep but is also shared within the family.

All personal folders are backed up daily via Borg Backup. Borg takes folder snapshots, encrypting and deduplicating chunks. Each daily backup goes to a local NAS (with RAID-1) and to a remote storage.

A couple of times per year I plug a portable HDD and back up everything to a borg repository there as well.

That should be good enough for the rule 3-2-1:

• Keep 3 copies of data.
• Use 2 different types of storage.
• Have at least one off-site replica.

I keep 10 daily, 6 weekly, 14 monthly and 99 yearly snapshots. Since snapshot reuses file chunks, that doesn't take a lot of space. Compression saves a few GB on top of that.

NAS itself is used to store family photos. Some of the folders there are configured to be backed up to a remote storage via Borg (same setup). This is less strict and should be cleaned up later.

Published: January 30, 2022.

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