I have a confession to make.

I’ve been working in IT for about 6/7 years now and I’ve been selfhosting for about 5. And in all this time, in my work environment or at home, I’ve never bothered about backups. I know they are essential for every IT network, but I never cared to learn it. Just a few copies of some harddisks here and there and that is actually all I know. I’ve tried a few times, but I’ve often thought the learning curve to steep, or the commandline gave me some errors I didn’t want to troubleshoot.

It is time to make a change. I’m looking for an easy to learn backup solution for my home network. I’m running a Proxmox server with about 8 VMs on it, including a NAS full of photos and a mediaserver with lots of movies and shows. It has 2x 8TB disks in a RAID1 set. Next to that I’ve got 2 windows laptops and a linux desktop.

What could be a good backup solution that is also easy to learn?

I’ve tried Borg, but I couldn’t figure out all the commandline options. I’m leaning towards Proxmox Backup Server, but I don’t know if it works well with something other than my Proxmox server. I’ve also thought about Veeam since I encounter it sometimes at work, but the free version supports only up to 10 devices.

My plan now is to create 2 backup servers, 1 onsite, running on something like a raspberry pi or an HP elitedesk. The other would be an HP microserver N40L, which I can store offsite.

What could be the perfect backup solution for me?

EDIT:

After a few replies I feel the need to mention that I’m looking for a free and centrally managed option. Thanks!

  • @vegetaaaaaaaEnglish
    7•1 year ago

    File synchronization is not a backup.

      • @computergeek125English
        2•1 year ago

        Strictly speaking that sentence isn’t wrong, but many backup systems will also include several features (like bare metal restore) that aren’t going to be present in a file sync solution.

        Nextcloud is great as a gdrive/Dropbox/OneDrive replacement since it’s job is to replicate a folder at the profile level - but it will struggle with large files due to its upload trigger that will fire basically as the file is created. Also, most OS level files and databases won’t be accessible to a process running under user-level permissions.

        And while it’s not a requirement, typically backup systems use point in time snapshots of entire filesystems to ensure that databases are handled in a consistent manner, rather than the ad-hoc changes that Nextcloud will operate with. To note - a simplified backup solution like a cron-scheduled rsync will also be vulnerable to application file consistency issues for the same reason.

        So if the only important data on your computer is your home folder, yes, you could back your system up with Nextcloud. But you may want to have a script or automation platform of some kind to restore the OS and programs of the system running said home folder. Full system backups are great at getting your entire computer back online exactly wherever it left off from the previous backup.