I see many posts asking about what other lemmings are hosting, but I’m curious about your backups.

I’m using duplicity myself, but I’m considering switching to borgbackup when 2.0 is stable. I’ve had some problems with duplicity. Mainly the initial sync took incredibly long and once a few directories got corrupted (could not get decrypted by gpg anymore).

I run a daily incremental backup and send the encrypted diffs to a cloud storage box. I also use SyncThing to share some files between my phone and other devices, so those get picked up by duplicity on those devices.

  • @danA
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    31 year ago

    I use Borgbackup 1.2.x. It works really well. Significantly faster than Duplicity. Borg uses block-level deduplication instead of doing incremental backups, meaning the backup won’t grow indefinitely like with duplicity (this is why you have to periodically do a full backup with Duplicity). The Borg server has an “append-only” mode meaning the client can only add data to the backup and not remove it - this is useful because if an attacker were to gain access to the client, they can’t delete all your backups. This is a common issue with other backup systems - the client has full access to the backup, so there’s nothing stopping an attacker from erasing the client system plus all its backups.

    For storing the backups, I have two storage VPSes - One with HostHatch in Los Angeles ($10/month for 10TB space) and one with Servarica in Montreal Canada (3.5GB space for $84/year).

    Each system being backed up performs the backup twice - Once to each VPS. Borgbackup recommends this approach over only performing one backup then rsyncing it to a different server. The idea is that if one backup gets corrupted (or deleted by an attacker, etc), the other one should still be OK as it’s entirely separate.