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.
Every hour via Restic to a local Mino instance on my NAS. Once a day to backblaze B2. Once a week to an offline HDD in my fire safe.
Keep in mind the more often you backup the less total time each backup should take to run. If your backup software isn’t too heavy to run and stores backups incrementally, there is little penalty to frequent backups.
It depends what I’m backing up and where it’s backing up to.
I do local/lan backups at a much higher rate because there’s more bandwidth to spare and effectively free storage. So for those as often as every 10 mins if there are changes to back up.
For less critical things and/or cloud backups I have a less frequent schedule as losing more time on those is less critical and it costs more to store on the cloud.
I use Kopia for backups on all my servers and desktop/laptop.
I’ve been very happy with it, it’s FOSS and it saved my ass when Windows Update corrupted my bitlocker disk and I lost everything. That was also the last straw that put me on Linux full-time.
I’m probably the overkill case because I have AD+vC and a ton of VMs.
RPO 24H for main desktop and critical VMs like vCenter, domain controllers, DHCP, DNS, Unifi controller, etc.
Twice a week for laptops and remote desktop target VMs
Once a week for everything else.
Backups are kept: (may be plus or minus a bit)
Daily backups for a week
Weekly backups for a month
Monthly backups for a year
Yearly backups for 2-3y
The software I have (Synology Active Backup) captures data using incremental backups where possible, but if it loses its incremental marker (system restore in windows, change-block tracking in VMware, rsync for file servers), it will generate a full backup and deduplicate (iirc).
From the many times this has saved me from various bad things happening for various reasons, I want to say the RTO is about 2-6h for a VM to restore and 18 for a desktop to restore from the point at which I decide to go back to a backup.
Right now my main limitation is my poor quad core Synology is running a little hot on the CPU front, so some of those have farther apart RPOs than I’d like.
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.
How often depends on how much work it is to recreate, or the consequences of loosing data.
Some systems do not have real data locally, get a backup every week. Most get a nightly backup. Some with a high rate of change , get a lunch/middle of the workday run.
Some have hourly backups/snapshots, where recreating data is impossible. CriticL databases have hourly + transaction log streaming offsite.
How long to keep a history depends on how likely an error can go unnoticed but minimum 14 days.
Most have 10 dailes + 5 weeky + 6 monthly + 1 yearly.
If you have paper recipes and can recreate data lost easily. Daily seems fine.
IMO set up a good incremental backup system with deduplication and then back up everything at least once a day as a baseline. Anything that’s especially valuable can be backed up more frequently, but the price/effort of backing up at least once a day should become trivial if everything is set up correctly.
If you feel like hourly snapshots would be worth it, but too resource-intensive, then maybe replacing them with local snapshots of the file system (which are basically free, if your OS/filesystem supports them) might be reasonable. Those obviously don’t protect against hardware failure, but help against accidental deletion.
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.
didn’t have money for an external hard drive or anything like that growing up, so a lot of stuff got lost over the years. but when i upgrade my NAS’ hard drive i will buy an enclosure and scrape all of the important stuff together. like recovery codes for my 3ds collection, old photos of my late cat. that kinda stuff. then i’ll see how frequently i’m gonna update the data.
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.
7 daily backups, 4 weekly backups, 6 monthly backups (incremental, using rsnapshot). The latest weekly backup is also copied to an offline/offsite drive.
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Every hour via Restic to a local Mino instance on my NAS. Once a day to backblaze B2. Once a week to an offline HDD in my fire safe.
Keep in mind the more often you backup the less total time each backup should take to run. If your backup software isn’t too heavy to run and stores backups incrementally, there is little penalty to frequent backups.
It depends what I’m backing up and where it’s backing up to.
I do local/lan backups at a much higher rate because there’s more bandwidth to spare and effectively free storage. So for those as often as every 10 mins if there are changes to back up.
For less critical things and/or cloud backups I have a less frequent schedule as losing more time on those is less critical and it costs more to store on the cloud.
I use Kopia for backups on all my servers and desktop/laptop.
I’ve been very happy with it, it’s FOSS and it saved my ass when Windows Update corrupted my bitlocker disk and I lost everything. That was also the last straw that put me on Linux full-time.
Snapahots are not backups!
Snapshots are near instand in ZFS or BTRFS. Also they do not consome much CPU to make them.
Backups are not stored in the same device. What i use to make backups is a combination of borg and urbackup.
I’m probably the overkill case because I have AD+vC and a ton of VMs.
RPO 24H for main desktop and critical VMs like vCenter, domain controllers, DHCP, DNS, Unifi controller, etc.
Twice a week for laptops and remote desktop target VMs
Once a week for everything else.
Backups are kept: (may be plus or minus a bit)
The software I have (Synology Active Backup) captures data using incremental backups where possible, but if it loses its incremental marker (system restore in windows, change-block tracking in VMware, rsync for file servers), it will generate a full backup and deduplicate (iirc).
From the many times this has saved me from various bad things happening for various reasons, I want to say the RTO is about 2-6h for a VM to restore and 18 for a desktop to restore from the point at which I decide to go back to a backup.
Right now my main limitation is my poor quad core Synology is running a little hot on the CPU front, so some of those have farther apart RPOs than I’d like.
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.
Whenever I’ve gone too far forwards
How often depends on how much work it is to recreate, or the consequences of loosing data.
Some systems do not have real data locally, get a backup every week. Most get a nightly backup. Some with a high rate of change , get a lunch/middle of the workday run.
Some have hourly backups/snapshots, where recreating data is impossible. CriticL databases have hourly + transaction log streaming offsite.
How long to keep a history depends on how likely an error can go unnoticed but minimum 14 days. Most have 10 dailes + 5 weeky + 6 monthly + 1 yearly.
If you have paper recipes and can recreate data lost easily. Daily seems fine.
IMO set up a good incremental backup system with deduplication and then back up everything at least once a day as a baseline. Anything that’s especially valuable can be backed up more frequently, but the price/effort of backing up at least once a day should become trivial if everything is set up correctly.
If you feel like hourly snapshots would be worth it, but too resource-intensive, then maybe replacing them with local snapshots of the file system (which are basically free, if your OS/filesystem supports them) might be reasonable. Those obviously don’t protect against hardware failure, but help against accidental deletion.
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.
didn’t have money for an external hard drive or anything like that growing up, so a lot of stuff got lost over the years. but when i upgrade my NAS’ hard drive i will buy an enclosure and scrape all of the important stuff together. like recovery codes for my 3ds collection, old photos of my late cat. that kinda stuff. then i’ll see how frequently i’m gonna update the data.
Never
I back up every morning to get to work and every afternoon to get back home lol
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.
7 daily backups, 4 weekly backups, 6 monthly backups (incremental, using rsnapshot). The latest weekly backup is also copied to an offline/offsite drive.