@Sunny Backups are done weekly, using Restic (and with ‘–read-data-subset=9%’ to verify that the backup data is still valid).

But that’s also in addition to doing nightly Snapraid syncs for larger media, and Syncthing for photos & documents (which means I have copies on 2+ machines).

Most backup software allow you to configure backup retention. I think I went with some pretty standard once per day for a week. After that they get deleted, and it keeps just one per week of the older ones, for one or two months. And after that it’s down to monthly snapshots. I think that aligns well with what I need. Sometimes I find out something broke the day before yesterday. But I don’t think I ever needed a backup from exactly the 12th of December or something like that. So I’m fine if they get more sparse after some time. And I don’t need full backups more than necessary. An incremental backup will do unless there’s some technical reason to do full ones.

But it entirely depends on the use-case. Maybe for a server or stuff you work on, you don’t want to lose more than a day. While it can be perfectly alright to back up a laptop once a week. Especially if you save your documents in the cloud anyway. Or you’re busy during the week and just mess with your server configuration on weekends. In that case you might be alright with taking a snapshot on fridays. Idk.

(And there are incremental backups, full backups, filesystem snapshots. On a desktop you could just use something like time machine… You can do different filesystems at different intervals…)

I classify the data according to its importance (gold, silver, bronze, ephemeral). The regularity of the zfs snapshots (15 minutes to several hours) and their retention time (days to years) on the server depends on this. I then send the more important data that I cannot restore or can only restore with great effort (gold and silver) to another server once a day. For bronze, the zfs snapshots and a few days of storage time on the server are enough for me, as it is usually data that I can restore (build artifacts or similar) or is simply not that important. Ephemeral is for unimportant data such as caches or pipelines.

I honestly don’t have too much to back up, so I run one full backup job every Sunday for different directories I care about. They run a check on the directory and only back up any changes or new files. I don’t have the space to backup everything, so I only take the smaller stuff and most important. The backup software also allows live monitoring if I enable it, so some of my jobs I have that turned on since I didn’t see any reason not to. I reuse the NAS drives that report errors that I replace with new ones to save on money. So far, so good.

Backup software is Bvckup2, and reddit was a huge fan of it years ago, so I gave it a try. It was super cheap for a lifetime license at the time, and it’s super lightweight. Sorry, there is no Linux version.

Depends on the system but weekly at least

Backups???

Backup all of my proxmox-LXCs/VMs to a proxmox backup server every night + sync these backups to another pbs in another town. A second proxmox backup every noon to my nas. (i know, 3-2-1 rule is not reached…)

I continuous backup important files/configurations to my NAS. That’s about it.

IMO people who redundant/backup their media are insane… It’s such an incredible waste of space. Having a robust media library is nice, but there’s no reason you can’t just start over if you have data corruption or something. I have TB and TB of media that I can redownload in a weekend if something happens (if I even want). No reason to waste backup space, IMO.

And equally important, how do you do your backups? What system and to where?

Right now, I have a cron job set to run on Monday and Friday nights, is this too frequent?

Only you can answer this. How many days of data are you prepared to lose? What are the downsides of running your backup scripts more frequently?

Every hour, automatically

Never on my Laptop, because I’m too lazy to create a mechanism that detects when it’s possible.

No backup for my media. Only redundacy.

For my nextcloud data, anytime i made major changes.

Thanks for reminding me to validate.

Daily here also.

Daily backups here. Storage is cheap. Losing data is not.

Local zfs snap every 5 mins.

Borg backups everything hour to 3 different locations.

I’ve blown away docker folders of config files a few times by accident. So far I’ve only had to dip into the zfs snaps to bring them back.