I’m trying to find a good method of making periodic, incremental backups. I assume that the most minimal approach would be to have a Cronjob run rsync periodically, but I’m curious what other solutions may exist.

I’m interested in both command-line, and GUI solutions.

  • Avid Amoeba
    2·
    1 year ago

    Setup

    Machine A:

    • RAIDz1 takes care of single-disk failure
    • ZFS doing regular snapshots
    • Syncthing replicates the data off-site to Machine B

    Machine B:

    • RAIDz1 takes care of single-disk failure
    • ZFS doing regular snapshots
    • Syncthing receiving data from Machine A

    Implications

    • Any single-disk hardware failure on machine A or B results in no data loss
    • Physical destruction of A won’t affect B and the other way around
    • Any accidentally deleted or changed file can be recovered from a previous snapshot
    • Any ZFS corruption at A doesn’t affect B because send/recv isn’t used. The two filesystems are completely independent
    • Any malicious data destruction on A can be recovered from B even if it’s replicated via snapshot at B. The reverse is also true. A malicious actor would have to have root access on both A and B in order to destroy the data and the snapshots on both machines to prevent recovery
    • Any data destruction caused by Syncthing can be recovered from snapshot at A or B