What backup solution do you use?
What backup solution do you sue for your laptop? - Please say you use one ;)
For years I've used Deja Dup which is fine but relies on snap shots. So I moved to Resilio Sync which again works fine but the restore is a real headache, especially eating into the resources on a low spec machines.
So what solution do you use? USB hard disk? Cloud? NAS? I'm looking for inspiration, suitable for a low spec laptop.
I am a translator!
I backup my aunt's PC to a USB SSD using BackInTime.
For my personal data, I have two PCs (small box, rather low power consumption, one NVME and one SSD) always on running Trisquel, one at home and one at my parents-in-law. The one at home stores personal data and photos, I access them via samba at home and sftp remotely. The PC at home also does a daily backup to the other PC using borgmatic. Besides, the PC at home also runs syncthing, which I use for technical data that are replicated to multiple laptops I use. No backup of that, but there are at least 3 or 4 copies of those data.
(Forbidden error again.)
Back In Time with an external HDD. Trisquel ships Back In Time by default. It is extremely fast.
I configured Back In Time so that plugging the drive triggers the backup.
(Only short sentences now...)
Unless one has been done less than 24 hours ago.
At least with a drive formatted with ext4, Back In Time uses mere copies and hard links to older unmodified versions of the files. As a consequence, you can still transport the drive to share your data in the backup with a friend. Of course, doing backups on a drive at home means that a problem at home (robbery, fire, etc.) may affect both my laptop and its backup, when I am at home (I use the same laptop for work).
(Improved at once, for some reason.)
Have not used Back in Time, is the triggering when you connect the drive set in BIT?
What does "BIT" stand for in this context?
Back In Time makes a new snapshot when I plug the external HDD in a USB port. It is a udev rule that triggers the backup. A different choice can be made in Back In Time's setting, such as a constant frequency or whenever the system starts/reboots. With the GUI, it is a mere entry to select in a drop-down menu.
I use Borg [1] with a USB hard drive, using a single unencrypted repository for backups of multiple different computers. I use a 4TB hard drive which is just about full (though the space is not entirely taken up by the Borg repo). I've deleted some files from my computer with the expectation that I can retrieve them from a Borg backup, which in hindsight may be a mistake because now I cannot delete past backups without losing information I want to keep.
Ideally I would make a backup every month or more often than that, but I haven't made it a good habit of that, so I plan to eventually set up an automatic system that works over SSH, similar to what jxself suggests [2].
I like the idea of using something that comes pre-installed with Trisquel, but it seems like Back in Time doesn't support compression which seems important to me.
[1] `borgbackup` in apt
[2] https://jxself.org/vip.shtml
Hah, and here I was going to write about it and it's already been done.
I keep three copies of every (non-config) file stored in my personal folder, each on a different disk (main, internal and external backup). Backup frequency depends on frequency of changes. I use Meld to assess how much has changed and back up only those incremental changes. Full backup before system upgrade or fresh install.
The only exception is videos, which would fill up my main drive for no use. So I only keep two copies of those, on the backup disks.
Three copies of everything does sound a bullet proof way. It makes my Resilio sync to a NAS box a bit basic.