Hi, currently I have a almost none backups and I want to change them. I have a PC with Nextcloud on 500gb ssd that I also use for gaming (1tb system drive). Nextcloud would be used to store/sync images, documents, contacts, and calendar from my phone and laptop. I also have an old pc that has 2x 80gb, 120gb, 320gb, and 500gb hdd. I want to use it for other backups like OS snapshots, programming projects, etc. but its not a big hdd but a lot of small hdds. Should I store each backup on 2 drives? Can I automate this? Any suggestions would be helpful.
Yes, storing each backup in 2+ places is best.
You can of course automate it. If you’re running backups from Linux use
anacronrather thancronbecauseanacrontries to run when it can (when the machine turns on), whereascrondoesn’t run again if the machine was off when it was time to run.rsyncis the most straightfoward solution. Pros: it won’t copy files again if they haven’t changed; it can copy remotely over ssh. Con: it has a bit of a learning curve.BorgBackup would be my next recommendation, it takes distinct backups but doesn’t duplicate files between them. It has compression, encryption (optional) and you can run checks on the backups. Con: for remote use you need to run a borg server on the target machine. Another potential con is that it doesn’t store the files in a directly usable format like rsync. Borg archives are similar to a zip archive – you can list the files, you can extract them, you can even mount them somewhere and then access the files directly – but you can’t access them directly without borg.