I have a confession to make.
I’ve been working in IT for about 6/7 years now and I’ve been selfhosting for about 5. And in all this time, in my work environment or at home, I’ve never bothered about backups. I know they are essential for every IT network, but I never cared to learn it. Just a few copies of some harddisks here and there and that is actually all I know. I’ve tried a few times, but I’ve often thought the learning curve to steep, or the commandline gave me some errors I didn’t want to troubleshoot.
It is time to make a change. I’m looking for an easy to learn backup solution for my home network. I’m running a Proxmox server with about 8 VMs on it, including a NAS full of photos and a mediaserver with lots of movies and shows. It has 2x 8TB disks in a RAID1 set. Next to that I’ve got 2 windows laptops and a linux desktop.
What could be a good backup solution that is also easy to learn?
I’ve tried Borg, but I couldn’t figure out all the commandline options. I’m leaning towards Proxmox Backup Server, but I don’t know if it works well with something other than my Proxmox server. I’ve also thought about Veeam since I encounter it sometimes at work, but the free version supports only up to 10 devices.
My plan now is to create 2 backup servers, 1 onsite, running on something like a raspberry pi or an HP elitedesk. The other would be an HP microserver N40L, which I can store offsite.
What could be the perfect backup solution for me?
EDIT:
After a few replies I feel the need to mention that I’m looking for a free and centrally managed option. Thanks!
You can use syncthing to get files from all of your devices to your central server and then use something like FreeFileSync to backup the entire folder structure to another drive.
Kopia is my favorite by far!
It’s super fast and has tons of great features including cutting-edge encryption and several compression options.
It has a GUI and is cross-platform.
It can do both cloud and local/network backups.
That includes locally mounted disks, SFTP, rsync, or any network share/etc accessible from your machine as well as many cloud options.
The de-duplication stuff is also killer. If you upload the same file (or chunk of data) in different folders or even from different systems it will map them to the same backup storage potentially saving you a ton of storage space.
It also uses a rolling hash system so if you modify just a handful of megabytes from a 25GB file many times, only the megabytes of changes will need to be backed up to store the version history. You do not need to store 25GB every time you modify that file.
There’s a ton of other goodies as well!
And it’s all FOSS!
I use it to backup to an external hard drive, a NAS, and to Amazon S3. You can configure multiple repositories like that and have them all run at the same time (subject to their individual scheduling policies of course)
Use Veeam. If you hit the limit just configure it to send to a SMB share and you need no licens.
Maybe have a look at urbackup. Gui, “centrally managed”, free…
And please, as mentioned in another comment, have a look at Borgmatic. It makes Borg really easy to use and has some super handy features. Super easy backups to multiple locations by just adding a line in the config… And I just love the healthchecks integration. Set and forget until either healthchecks notifies you of a problem or you really need to recover data.
I’m gonna look into that! Borgmatic looks a lot easier than borg, but that CLI still scares me. I like working with Linux commands but something new like backups makes me want to click in a GUI to set everything up.
When I got started I preferred GUI apps too. The more you use them, the more you get to appreciate cli tools. Meanwhile I find cli tools better, they are just more precise and have a good way to push you to use them correctly. Also they are mostly well documented and even offer “on the fly” help with -h flags or alike… also the get started page of Borgmatic is really well written. Just play around with it ;)
I use kopia CLI, but the easiest one I came across with simple GUI is duplicati
KopiaUI is fantastic and easy to use. I used to run Duplicati but it had database issues that kept coming up and forcing a sixty-hour rebuild process every couple weeks and I wasn’t happy with the idea of my PC potentially failing during one of those six days per month.
Thx. I have read about duplicati issues and thats why I moved to Kopia. Duplicati is still doing smaller backups with no issues tho.
I know about KopiaUI on desktop, but can that run in server mode? Or do you connect to server using desktop app? I just start kopia web server when Im testing backups, but thats not the easiest way Id say.
I don’t run anything on the server because I don’t need to. I have my home server mounted as a network drive in Windows, so I just point Kopia’s database at a folder in there. It’s stored as an encrypted backup, and I’ve got the config for Kopia backed up in a few places (and the encryption key as well) so if the worst case scenario happens to my PC I’ll just reinstall Kopia on a fresh windows install + HDD, restore the config from the backup, then restore the backup.
I also have a backup target to an older 8TB drive that I leave with a friend and update whenever he visits for extra safety, if my whole apartment with my PC and server burns down I’ll at least be able to have an outdated snapshot and lose only a month or so instead of decades.
Kopia actually has a GUI option too! I use it all the time! I pair it with a docker webdav server running on my server pc across the room.
