Hello everyone,
I was wondering about your backup solutions and strategies, and share some of my experience.
Zorin comes preinstalled with Deja Dup as the backup solution. I've personally used this for several years, with success, until recently.
For those that don't know it Déjà Dup Backups – Apps for GNOME :
Protect yourself from data loss
Déjà Dup is a simple backup tool. It hides the complexity of backing up the Right Way (encrypted, off-site, and regular) and uses duplicity as the backend.
- Support for local, remote, or cloud backup locations such as Google Drive
- Securely encrypts and compresses your data
- Incrementally backs up, letting you restore from any particular backup
- Schedules regular backups
- Integrates well into your GNOME desktop
Déjà Dup focuses on ease of use and recovering from personal, accidental data loss. If you need a full system backup or an archival program, you may prefer other backup apps.
Occasionally, I distrohop. When I do, I install Deja Dup, restore from backup and happily get underway. After restoration I setup Deja Dup to backup every other day.
I recently did this when I tried the Fedora KDE Spin. The restoration worked fine, but when it tried to automatically backup, it would just get stuck at starting to backup. I didn't pay much attention, I was just trying Fedora with KDE, my backups were recent and I didn't add any new meaningful data.
I can't even remember why, but Fedora wasn't working out for me and installed Kubuntu. Again I installed and fired up Deja Dup. This time there was... nothing. Deja Dup could not find any backup. I opened the file explorer to navigate to the backup folder and it was empty. Not a single file, just a 0 byte empty folder. I was shocked.
I tried file recovery tools and managed to recover many gpg encrypted archives. Deja Dup could only make sense of the ones from October 2022 however, and anything since could not be recovered. I tried to manually decrypt the more recent files, but they were from incremental backups and it turned into a mess.
Fortunately I also had a cloud backup/sync going on. It doesn't sync the largest files nor my volatile short-term directories because of bandwidth and storage limitations. Still, after more than 30 hours to download 130 GB of files, I managed to finally get most data back on my PC. It annoyed me that I lost some things, but at least my online storage covered the most critical files.
From now on I'll definitely stick to the 3-2-1 backup rule. I only managed 2-2-1 so until now because I couldn't find the time to clear out another hard-drive to keep another copy on. I've learned my lesson...
TL:DR: My advice to anyone reading this who hasn't done so yet: make backups, at least three, using at least two different methods, and keep at least one separate from the others.
Now as for my question for who's still with me after that wall of text: Which backup software do you use? Deja Dup served me well for years, but as you might have guessed I'm very interested in an additional option.
Note: @LoveZorin mention PikaBackup recently, which builds on BorgBackup rather than Duplicity/rsync. So like LoveZorin I'm curious about people's experience with its reliability.
Thank for reading and commenting.