Linux

What are you trying to accomplish? Is a filesystem-level backup really the thing you need for those services, or do you need something more like a database dump or replica?

...what? All I need is a single bash script (and less than 5 minutes) to recover all my previous stuff back.

All you need is restic, rclone, snapper and btrfs. Snapper and btrfs work almost on their own, rclone helps you connect to remote/cloud storage and restic enables very straightforward backups.

As for restic, you just need to mind that it creates lock-files, so if there's an unexpected shutdown, you might need to delete them manually. The advantage is that you can access one repo from multiple machines. And don't forget to run a cleanup command in your script (in case you automate it), because there are no automatic ones.

rclone is usually rather easy to use, but your mileage may vary depending on the type of storage you want to use. Especially if you want to tune for maximum performance.

After all the posts about backups, I started looking at mine with a more critical eye and discovered ways that it's lacking. I am using duplicity because of the number of backends (I'm using rsync), my ancient NAS has a module for an rsync server, it can do incremental, it can encrypt the backups and it is available on all my distros' package managers.

I am excluding files from packages that haven't changed and other things that can be downloaded, like Docker images. I've used it a few times to restore a misplaced "sudo rm -rf . " in a subdir of home with success! But, I realized that a full restore will be time consuming and difficult because I don't know my LVM structure, installed packages, etc.

I call duplicity with a script via cron, so I am updating it to dump installed packages, LVM info, sfdisk structure, LUKS headers and fstab into a "config" backup. I'll have another backup of everything else in another backup archive. My plan is to boot from a USB disk, restore the config backup to a RAM disk, format the drives, apply the LVM structure, set up LUKS from the saved config info, mount the disks to restore via the saved fstab, then use the package manager to install the packages from the config file, then restore the backup on top of that.

It's a little more work, but I'm hoping that the backups will he small enough that I don't need to buy more drives to keep my backups.

I do have a mysql database that I dump to a backup file which gets scooped up in the drive backup, so I don't need to take the DB offline and I have my containers' volumes on a btrfs disk, so I can just take a snapshot and back that up. I haven't updated the script for that yet, but it's currently working with LVM snapshots.

HTH, pray you never really need the backup!

For a Dropbox-y experience (albeit slow) I have been using SpiderOak. I wanted an E2E encrypted cloud backup and it fits the bill (Snowden Approved™). I can't help feeling I could get faster and cheaper results with something hand-rolled but... time

You mentioned it, but snapshots are the key. Lvm, btrfs, zfs. Take a snapshot, back it up, delete it.