I recently implemented a backup workflow for me. I heavily use restic for desktop backup and for a full system backup of my local server. It works amazingly good. I always have a versioned backup without a lot of redundant data. It is fast, encrypted and compressed.

But I wondered, how do you guys do your backups? What software do you use? How often do you do them and what workflow do you use for it?

  • Zenlix@lemm.eeOP
    4·
    6 hours ago

    Thanks for your hint towards borgbackup.

    After reading the Quick Start of Borg Backup they look very similar. But as far as I can tell, borg can be encrypted and compressed while restic is always. You can mounting your backups in restic to. It also seems that restic supports more repository locations such as several cloud storages and via a special http server.

    I also noticed that borg is mainly written in python while restic is written in go. That said I assume that restic is a bit faster based on the language (I have not tested that).

    • drspod@lemmy.ml
      1·
      4 hours ago

      It was a while ago that I compared them so this may have changed, but one of the main differences that I saw was that borg had to backup over ssh, while restic had a storage backend for many different storage methods and APIs.

    • ferric_carcinization@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      4 hours ago

      I haven’t used either, much less benchmarked them, but the performance differences should be negligible due to the IO-bound nature of the work. Even with compression & encryption, it’s likely that either the language is fast enough or that it’s implemented in a fast language.

      Still, I wouldn’t call the choice of language insignificant. IIRC, Go is strongly typed while Python isn’t. Even if type errors are rare, I would rather trust software written to be immune to them. (Same with memory safety, but both languages use garbage collection, so it’s not really relevant in this case.)

      Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe one of the tools cannot fully utilize the network or disk. Perhaps one of them uses multithreaded compression while the other doesn’t. Architectual decisions made early on could also cause performance problems. I’d just rather not assume any noticeable performance differences caused by the programming language used in this case.

      Sorry for the rant, this ended up being a little longer than I expected.

      Also, Rust rewrite when? :P