Here are some features off the top of my head that some backups software might have that other don’t, or that you’ll want to consider when choosing or making a system:

• Application aware backups: E.G. DB Backups without shutting down the database. Could also be hypervisor/container awareness.
• Restore: The ability to automatically restore files, systems, possibly to a new location.
• Application aware restore/browsing: Being able to pull individual files from a backup, or accounts from a directory system
• Backup copy: Automatically copying the backup to multiple destinations, disk or S3.
• Retention: Automatically keeping a set number of backups, often including a number of weekly or monthly historical long term copies.
• Backup Diffs: Keeping backups in a way that you only store the data changed rather than a full copy.
• Compression: Compressing the stored data
• Immutability: Keeping backups in a way that allows a (usually cloud) storage provider to lock files for X amount of days to prevent malicious deletions
• Encryption: Encrypting your backups if they’re kept on someone else’s infrastructure or a non-secured area
• Verification: Checking that the backups are intact and not corrupt.
• Control panel: A single place to view the progress and completeness of all backups
• Alerts: Notifications for failed backups, or hooks for successful backups for healthchecks.
• Virus scans: Making sure a backups is malware-free before restore.
• Retries: Ability to retry backups or copies in case of temporary outages before sending alerts

I’m not sure which of these exist in free software, my experience is mostly on enterprise software. A backups system can be as simple as a rsync/zip cron job or a full integrated system depending on what you need.

I use restic in combination with rsync.

Two days ago, I tried to setup unbound and fucked up my Nextcloud instance on the same host.

Restic restored /opt, /etc, /home and /var and then I used rsync to divvy them all out. For some reason, restic didn’t recognize the --delete flag so, rsync it was.

Reboot, waited 3 minutes, reload, there’s my Nextcloud login screen. Database cleaned up using occ commands and I’m back.

My restic repo sits on my main NAS, and a copy of it on another system. It holds all of my host’s aforementioned directories for easy setup and restore from either bad luck or dumb ideas.

…usually dumb ideas.

ZFS. Since it backs up at block level, moving giant files means you onoy send a few K for the backup, unlike other solutions like rsync, etc.

I use Duplicati, is that a bad solution?

Haven’t used all of those but my recommendation would be to just start trying them. Start small, get a feel for it and expand usage or try a different backup solution. You should be able to do automatic backups for any of them either directly or setting up your own timer/cron jobs (which is how i do it with rsync).

There’s a balance to pick between ease of use, ease of recovery, and security. You have to define exactly what you want, and then look at what solutions are available to do that.

I wrote my own bash script for rsync that simply pulls copies of the vital folders and files over SSH from the machines I want backups from. Then it pushes a copy of all of that to an offsite (in-city friends house) location. There is no encryption at rest, because I choose easy of recovery over security. I also trust my friend, and there really isn’t anything that would compromise me totally, if that harddrive became available on the internet. There also aren’t multiple versions of old files, and if a file is deleted, then it is gone, because I don’t need that feature from my backup system.

Define your needs, then shop around. No one solution does everything easily.

Not sure about other options but Backrest has worked wonderfully for me since day 1. Basically just a GUI for Restic. My only complaints are that jobs can’t be assigned to multiple repos and you can’t edit a job’s name or repo once created. Aside from those quirks, it works fine - I have daily, weekly, monthly, and manual jobs set up across both servers and my desktop, basically just set it and forget it.

I use borg with borgmatic. Heck, if you’re using Nextcloud AIO, borg is built in. It uses rsync, and takes incremental, deduplicated backups. I like it because it’s mostly just setting up ssh and a config file.

More specifically I use Nextcloud’s built in borg and these two containers:

Borgmatic

Borgserver

Edit: I forgot that for my personal devices I use PikaBackup, which also uses Borg.

I use borg (borgmatic) to back up home server to home nas. The only major disadvantage of borg is that it requires running borg also on the receiving end, so it doesn’t work with a lot of cloud storage providers like S3.

Restic can work with most everything as a backup target.

The question you’re asking is too broad. Every tool somehow differs from the others, but listing all differences requires in-depth knowledge of each tool and a lot of time.

At the end of the day, every tool somehow backs up your data. CLI interfaces, encryption algorithms, deduplication logic, supported backends, underlying programming languages and a lot more may differ. Identify what’s most important to you, test different solutions and then use the tool that works best for your use-case.

I am currently looking into borg because it can take incremental backups. I just need figure out how I should handle a running system, if I need to turn of all my docker images or if there is some kind of snapshot function I can use.

From what I read on their FAQ, Borg cannot verify the integrity so I would need to turn everything off during the backup process. A filesystem like ZFS could have solved that problem (cannot find the link, something about shadow copy I think?) but since I don’t have a backup yet nor physical access, I need to work with what I have.

I think I will set it to take a backup every night.

EDIT: Maybe it can verify integrity? Still trying to find information on my use case. https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/check.html

I personally use rsync since I do most my work by command line these days. It’s taken nearly half a year really understand it but it offers the flexibility I desire.

I have a small network with only a handful of devices. I keep all my incremental backups on encrypted partitions and encrypted detachable SSD’s which I manually decrypt. Rsync is set up to use SSH so there’s some form of encrypted transfers but that’s not actually a priority for me, just an added benefit.

I also use rsync to sync files and directories while maintaining additional system attributes across multiple systems. That is to say, what’s root or user accessible stays root or user accessible after the transfer is complete.

If I desired more protection, I’d probably look into Borg backup. Currently I just use encryption as an annoyance deterrence method. I also stick to the base Rsync command because every other option I tried brought with it complexities which have all failed me. I at least have a high level confidence in my backup/restore process now.

syncthing fom mobile direct sync to zfs mirror homeserver as soon as within home wlan. Same with PC files.

rclone sync via cron weekly to cloud server, encrypted.

security cams direct encrypted sync to zfs and cloud as soon as something is recorded.

I do monthly backups with cron and tar and syncthing for my containers.

I do quarterly backups of my server (14TB) to external USB HDDs. This is done via a script that mounts the drives, runs rsync to copy, then unmounts the drives again and emails me when it is done. I dont bother encrypting them as it ia mainly just media.