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  • > There are two types of people: those who have suffered a catastrophic loss of data, and those who will.

    This is an empirical claim, but is it grounded in reality?

    99% of people don't backup, and that's probably the right choice because the risk is low, they can't meaningfully improve their restoration rate themselves and they don't care enough about their data to classify its loss as catastrophic.

    When a person hears someone talk about the importance of backups, but also haven't heard friends/family suffer this date, they will rightfully ignore this warning.

    Or do we all follow the best practices as it relates to backups, exercise, sleep, nutrition, accounting, house maintenance, ... Etc.

    I do not. Backups aren't near the top of that list.

    This stuff just isn't very important to most people and that's okay.

    by flippingheck
  • "encrypted, chunk-level deduplicated, GFS-rotated, point-in-time archived, cloud, 3-2-1 backup solution" is now my newest password, no commas. (Don't tell anyone!)
    by bloomingeek
  • I’m setting up 3-2-1-ish backups for my infra of 3 hosts, and definitely leaning towards Restic + Backrest.

    All my hosts run the same CoreOS setup (https://github.com/ebrahim37/infra-template), where container volumes are placed in one central volumes/ folder and that is the only thing I have to backup.

    I plan to implement it like this:

      vps1:
  - restic container with custom sh entrypoint that will backup volumes/ to homelab every 24 hours
  homelab:
  - backrest container, to back up volumes/, do prune/check, replicate repo to offsite
  - rest-server container, will store backups from vps1, homelab, offsite
  offsite:
  - restic container, backs up volumes/ to homelab every 24 hours
  - rest-server container, store copy of backups from homelab
    Only caveat is backing up databases, will either have to do: stop container, backup volume/database-data, start container; or use pg dump etc.

    The deduplication is nice, you can have a snapshot for each week of the past year without crazy storage cost

    by ebrahimh
  • If you don't control your data size, it will end up controlling you and your backup choices, which will eventually lead to many avoidable, disastrous outcomes. Somehow, this gets missed in data storage and backup planning.
    by crossroadsguy
  • I really like ZFS snapshots with offsite pull-mode sync using Jim Salter's sanoid/syncoid [1]. ZFS is the base for all OS/filesystems on top of it. If you have a good system for organizing ZFS datasets, and separating ephemeral from persistent data (e.g. [2]), then this is 90% of the backup requirements already fullfilled.

        [1]: https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid
    [2]: https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2026-05-16_rootless_docker_virtiofs_proxmox/
    by Helmut10001
  • > “There are two types of people: those who have suffered a catastrophic loss of data, and those who will.”

    When I was a teenager, I was the reason for data loss for my dad, twice. Both times it was because I was re-partitioning a hard drive to install linux.

    You would think that taught me a lesson about backups, instead it reminds me every now and again to be grateful for an awesome dad and aspire to handle situations with my kid similarly :)

    by dirkc
  • A friend of mine used to work at Veritas[0] making enterprise data retention solutions. When I spoke about their product as being "making backups", he corrected me by saying:

      We are not in the backup business.  We are in the restoration
  business.
    0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup_Exec
    by AdieuToLogic
  • There are four times in my life I have suffered regrettable data loss incidents.

    The first was when the telephone pole outside our house was struck directly by lightning. Not only was it the loudest thing I have ever heard, the current surged through the telephone line, into the internal fax modem, and fries everything within its vicinity. I was 10. I did have backuos, but only only floppy and they didn't cover everything.

    The second was storing data in OneDrive - a change to their terms surrounding "lifetime" unlikely noted storage, combined with a client that was unusably slow to download and a deadline for data retrieval meant that I lost most of my files.

    The third was SD card failure in digital camera on holiday, the controller chip died catastrophically, leaving the card completely unrecognised. It was a brand new Sony 128GB card, manufactured by Toshiba, and it seemed to be a common issue. I now shoot to two cards simultaneously.

    And the fourth time was ... Performing a backup. An errant script deleted the source content, but I'd also deleted the existing backup to free up space for the new backup. I've been weary of using rewritable media for some time now as a consequence, but I think backups themselves are high risk activities.

    by publlus_enigma

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