I’m using urbackup to backup our computers to a local server at home. But per best practices, I want to offsite at least one backup regularly, so I have another server which lives at my parents’ house; conversely I’m going to back up their machines and send that to our house.
But I’m struggling to work out how to make that process efficient. My broadband isn’t stellar (80down, 20mb up), and my parents’ is similar (100/10 I think). A full backup on one of my machines is 20-30Gb, so trying to send that over the wire isn’t going to be fun. I’d hoped to do a ‘incremental forever’ but I’m reading that’s a bad idea. I also found recently that my full backup had disappeared for one machine, rendering the incrementals basically useless, as I’d not got the retention right, which rather proves that point anyway! So now I’m a little worried about what to do.
So I’m wondering what’s the best way to do this? Backup my machines but somehow maintain an offsite copy of some sort.
Most grateful for any replies.
I was thinking of something similar. And likely will settle on something like syncthing. Manually drive a clone to the other site, and then keep that updated using syncthing.
Driving the first backup clone to site will save a lot of effort. Faster to drive 30GB to the other site than wait for the initial backup.
The main part of the question is really - how much data changes each week?
Trying to send a whole urbackup backup file to the other site is going to be a much bigger data transfer. Simpler to just clone the actual data.
I have done exactly that in the past. Syncthing was my plan B option really, as it can do a trash so it doesn’t kill stuff instantly if the machine gets compromised or whatnot. I like Urbackup though, the client is more reliable, and the configurability of when it backs up is much more desireable.
I’ve got a lot of data (photos and whatnot) that I can sync one time, and just send changes - even rsync could cope with that (but again, I need trash to avoid a mass file loss).
But since I seem to need to run a full backup every month or so to maintain the integrity of the backups, and ensure I don’t end up with a ton of incrementals and all the mess that can cause, I’m still not sure how to handle it.
Weirdly the image backup has a mechanism to handle this, but considering my machines can be full of Steam libraries a fill image backup of each machine is going to eat a lot of disk.
Why backup Steam? I cut that out of my backups as that can be reinstalled, and tends to be huge.
Well yeah OK, bad example. I do have a lot of stuff on my machines, all sorts of random stuff strewn about. A ‘full’ backup of user profiles is ~40GB so still pretty big. Probably be more like 800GB with Steam.