What are your use cases? How do you use this tool?

[gerardbosch]

This thread is just to listen how other people is managing their backups, what do they backup and to learn from the setup and experiences of each other.

I will start :D

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I use this tool just to make a backup of my homedir of my computer, so all I have is BACKUP_PATHS=/home/myuser. For the rest, the defaults (and default profile) works fine to me. This gives me a the first 10GB for free of storage as per Backblaze B2 conditions at the time of writing.

• OS: Linux (may extend to MacOS at some point in time, by creating a separate bucket or account)

In case of disaster, my idea is just manually reinstall my Linux, and after that, install restic and do:

restic restore latest --target /

That should restore my backup path above into /, overwriting the newly created /home/myuser with the contents of my latest snapshot.

• I try to keep most of my settings and setup as dotfiles in home instead of modifying system files, so I don't expect much problem doing OS setup after that.
• Finally, do a manual installation of this script following the README in this repo to enable automated backups again.

[erikw]

Great idea!

When I started out with restic, my goal was to have full-system remote (client side encrypted incremental cheap) backup, so that I could restore parts of the system in case of a mess-up. On this first system (Arch Linux) I had a few different backup levels where this restic solution is one of the off-site parts. After messing around a lot and experienced many full system failures in life, I've become a bit concerned (obsessed?) with making backups :)

• Local
  • 1. COW filesystem (BTRFS or ZFS) with hourly, daily, monthly snapshots using snapper. Fast backup, to restore fast and for files that are not synced to other backups. Using OpenSUSE's snapper and for BSD zfstools
• Off-system
  • Mid-term backup on USB disk: using rsync to emulate Apple's Time Machine: time_machine.sh. Started when plugging in the disk, or as cronjob as long as plugged in.
• Off-site
  • Restic on scheduled timer (this project). Backups not the whole system, I ignore system files and binaries and aim to include files that I crafted myself like in /etc. I work with a blocklist instead of an includelist though, as I rather include too much than too little in my backup.
  • Git: all source code-like projects that can live in a git repo are in public or private GitHub repositories. Using the excellent tool ghq to mirror the git clones structure from the remote end to my local disk. Using this tool I will clone e.g. this repo directly to ~/src/github.com/erikw/restic-systemd-automatic-backup

With this setup, the most important documents are backed up at many places and the likelihood of me losing an important file is small!

Since the first system, I also used restic_backup.sh in Windows, macOS and freeBSD in the same manner as cronjob or Windows Scheduled tasks.

[gerardbosch]

A really backup obsession indeed 😄