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 tokeep
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.
Last update 30 Jan, 2022.