I was wondering how often does one choose to make and keep back ups. I know that “It depends on your business needs”, but that is rather vague and unsatisfying, so I was hoping to hear some heuristics from the community. Like say I had a workstation/desktop that is acting as a server at a shop (taking inventory / sales receipts) and would be using something like timeshift to keep snapshots. I feel like keeping two daily and a weekly would be alright for a store, since the two most recent would not be too old or something. I also feel like using the hourly snapshots would be too taxing on a CPU and might be using to much disk space.

  • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    I still have drawings I made in MS Paint on Windows 95 when it had just come out, my first text document, and the first report I ever typed in grade school.

    Btrfs snapshots of the root volume in RAID1 configuration with 8 hourly, 7 daily, 3 weekly, and automated rsync backups to NAS, with primary and secondary offsite, physically disconnected backups stored in sealed, airtight, and waterproof containers at two different banks prepaid storage and with advanced directive in the event of my demise.

    Bit of a hobby really. I acknowledge it’s completely unnecessary. I don’t like to lose data.

    • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      Sealed, airtight, and waterproof but what if both banks burn down at the same time? You didn’t mention fire-proof.

      • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        You got me there! Not fireproof. In that case I’m just hoping that having two off-site backups at different locations has me covered, but that’s a good idea. I should consider fireproof foil.

      • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        Another perspective is data hoarding.

        I have system images of machines of relatives who have died. Many of the photos that I have retained are the only ones. However, that was more an emergent utility than a motivating one.

  • krash@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    Like you said, “it depends” 😁

    I have a huge datablob that I mirror off-site once monthly. I have a few services that provides things for my family, I take a backup of them nightly (and run a “backup-restoration” scenario every six months). For my desktop, none at all - but I have my most critical data synched / documented so they can be restored to a functional state.

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    DNS Domain Name Service/System
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    Unifi Ubiquiti WiFi hardware brand
    ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

    4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.

    [Thread #418 for this sub, first seen 10th Jan 2024, 07:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • dr_robot@kbin.social
    0·
    8 months ago

    As others have said, with an incremental filesystem level mechanism, the backup process won’t be too taxing for the CPU. I have ZFS set up which makes this easy and I make hourly snapshots using sanoid which also get sent to another mirrored pair of connected drives using syncoid. Then, once a day, I upload encrypted daily snapshots to a bucket in the cloud using restic. Sounds complicated, but actually sanoid/syncoid and restic do all the heavy lifting. All I did is automate their schedules using systemd timers and some scripts to backup the right directories.

    • doeknius_gloek@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      I upload encrypted daily snapshots to a bucket in the cloud using restic.

      How do you upload a snapshot? I’m using TrueNAS where I can make snapshots visible in a otherwise hidden .zfs directory. Do you just backup from there or something similar? Is there an upside to backing up a snapshot instead of just the current data?

  • BCsven@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    There should be a whitepaper you can reference based on sales scenario. As others have said hourly, daily, weekly snapshots are not backups, unless you also have a btrfs or zfs send that IS backing up the snapshots to another remote device

  • ShortN0te@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    When you use deduplication on the backup side you can do backups every minute without needing much storage. When the backup programm looks at the filesystem to determine which file has changed, the CPU only need to process the changed files.

    For my personal devices i do daily backups. There is not enough change every day.