QOTD: How do you back up your files?

I asked this one almost a year ago and I started using Restic shortly after that. When I started, I was only backing up my home folder to the repository over NFS. Now, I’m backing up the entire root filesystem to a repository using the REST backend so I can run Restic as root without breaking the permissions.

I’m working on automating it now and I’m trying to come up with something using pinentry but my proof-of-concept is getting pretty obtuse. It will be spread out in a shell script, of course, but still.

systemd-inhibit --what=handle-lid-switch restic --password-command='su -c "printf '"'"'GETPIN\n\'"'"' | WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1 pinentry-qt5 | grep ^D | sed '"'"'s/^D //'"'"'" mckinley' --repository-file /root/restic-repo backup --exclude-file /root/restic-excludes --exclude-caches --one-file-system /

I’m curious to see how everyone’s backup solutions have changed since last year.

I wish there was a good GUI for Restic so I could have non-technical people using the same thing I do.

@mckinley@twtxt.net I use Restic and backup to another machine on my network as well as Backblaze B2

@prologic@twtxt.net How do you manage multiple remotes? Do you just run restic backup for each one?

@mckinley@twtxt.net Yeah pretry by hand at the moment.I only backup what I cannot reproduce.

@mckinley@twtxt.net My process hasn’t changed. (But the Gopher hole is gone. Here’s the file from 2023: https://movq.de/v/72fddfd8fe/2023-05-31–backups.txt )

What is your backup target btw? This NFS drive you’re speaking of is probably hosted on one of your local servers running in your apartment/house?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I remember your solution. It’s very simple, I like it.

Yes, my backup target is my home server. I have a hard drive dedicated to Restic repositories. It’s still not a real backup as I don’t have anything offsite but it’s better than my previous solution. I had two very old hard drives I kept plugged in to my desktop PC and I would (on very rare occasion) plug in another hard drive and copy all the files over to it. Luckily, I’ve never suffered any significant data loss and I would rather not start now. Once I have automated backups on each of my machines, the next project is getting those backups offsite.