I’m going to make a backup of 2TB SSD today. I will use clonezilla mainly because that’s all I know. But do you recommend any other ways for any reason?
I want to keep the process simple and easy. And I will likely take backup once a month or so repeatedly. It doesn’t have to be ready all the time. If you need more clarification, ask away.
My method requires that the drives be plugged in at all times, but it’s completely automatic.
I use rsync from a central ‘backups’ container that pulls folders from other containers and machines. These are organized in
/BACKUPS/(machine/container)_hostname/...The
/BACKUPS/folder is then pushed to an offsite container I have sitting at a friends place across town.For example, I backup my home folder on my desktop which looks like this on the backup container
/BACKUPS/Machine_Apollo/home/dork/This setup is not impervious to bitflips a far as I’m aware (it has never happened). If a bit flip happens upstream, it will be pushed to backups and become irrecoverable.
I see. This is more of a file system backup right? Do you recommend it over full disk backup for any reason? I can think of saving space.
I recommend it over a full disk backup because I can automate it. I can’t automate full disk backups as I can’t run dd reliably from a system that is itself already running.
It’s mostly just to ensure that I have config files and other stuff I’ve spent years building be available in the case of a total collapse so I don’t have to rebuilt from scratch. In the case of containers, those have snapshots. Anytime I’m working on one, I drop a snapshot first so I can revert if it breaks. That’s essentially a full disk backup but it’s exclusive to containers.
edit: if your goal is to minimize downtime in case of disk failure, you could just use RAID
Can’t you do a snapshot like VSS does on windows and back that up on a running system? I assume with a filesystem that supports snapshots that would be possible.
I’m sure there’s ways to do it, but I can’t do it and it’s not something I’m keen to learn given that I’ve already kind of solved the problem :p
I’m on a similar boat except I might have less time resource available in the future cause I’m getting a job.
Hopefully I could automate full disk backup because if something like Immich breaks, I can just load up from the backup drive. My family also use the services so… I think it’s great you brought up RAID but I believe when Immich or any software mess things up it’s not recoverable right?
RAID is not a backup, no. It’s redundancy. It’ll keep your service up and running in the case of a disk failure and allow you to swap in a new disk with no data loss. I don’t know how Immich works but I would put it in a container and drop a snapshot anytime I were to update it so if it breaks I can just revert.