Hi!

nisp1953 via Dng - 25.05.24, 20:07:55 CEST:
> I recently installed Devuan Daedalus 5.0 and it is working great.
> Thanks very much. I need advice on ways to backup my /home user
> account. I have been using tar but I am hoping the list can advise me
> of a better backup method or Debian (Devuan) package that I can use.
> I'd prefer something that does incremental backups.

I'd recommend either borgbackup or resticbackup. There are compressing,
deduplicating (on the block level) and optionally client-side encrypting.

Or in case you do not need any compression or rely on the filesystem to
compress you could rsync. I still use rsync together with BTRFS mounted
with "compress=zstd". I made a little shell script that generates a BTRFS
snapshot from the subvolume I like to backup, rsync it to the destination
and snapshot the state there as well. But there are ready made tools for
that like btrbk which I bet use BTRFS send/receive functionality. I never
used btrbk or a similar tool so far.

Of course for that at least your destination filesystem must be a BTRFS or
another filesystem capable of doing snapshots, unless you would like to use
a tool like rsnapshot that uses rsync and hardlinks to deduplicate on the
file level.

A disadvantage of any rsync based approach of course is that in case you
rename a directory with 10 GiB on the subsequent backup you need another
10 GiB even if the contents of that directory did not change. Unlike BTRFS
send/receive rsync does not detect renames.

The disadvantage of using BTRFS send/receive however would be that you
need to maintain a previous snapshot on the source so that send/receive
can just transfer the differences to the current state on the next time.

Of course the choice of a good tool also depends on the kind of backup
storage. The above is suited for local disks, probably spread around
several locations for additional resiliency as well as backup through SSH.
Basically my rsync with BTRFS based script also collects the data from my
router and my servers in addition to the laptop data. Maybe in future also
from a handy with PostmarketOS.

There are also GUI based helpers available for rsync (many) and borgbackup
(Vorta) at least. Not sure about resticbackup, but I bet there is some GUI
available for it as well. I prefer scripting my backup.


Of course there is a myriad of other ways to do backups. There are
literally hundreds of backup tools available for Linux. Quite some of them
are packaged within Debian and thus Devuan. Going from fully blown complex
client/server architectures as simple script based tools.

And there is Proxmox Backup Server, but Proxmox relies heavily on Systemd
for service startup and I am not aware of a Systemd free version of
Proxmox Backup Server or the KVM/LXC based virtualization solution they
provide. But aside from setting it up and accessing the web frontend of it
occasionally, there is likely not to be a need to interact often with it.
It is free software, but after having been set up you likely can just
treat it as kind of black box that just works. It is deduplicating,
compressing and optionally client-side encrypting.

Also there is the approach to backup to optical media, which can be
interesting with DVD-RAM or similar long-life Bluray media. There is
dvdbackup, recently completed by bluraybackup (not yet in stable) and the
generic disk archiver (dar), probably combined with par2 for more
resiliency. Capacity and speed would be the main limitation there.

My recommendation still would be to go for something simple enough for
backup of your own private data. Of course preferably test the restore. I
have done migration from one laptop to another by restoring from backup.
However with my rsync based approach it needs quite some knowledge of
setting up the partitioning and the bootloader. Relax and Recover (rear)
may help with that, but I never tried it.

I am sure others will come up with a myriad of other suggestions.

Best,
--
Martin