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!
KopiaUI is fantastic and easy to use. I used to run Duplicati but it had database issues that kept coming up and forcing a sixty-hour rebuild process every couple weeks and I wasn’t happy with the idea of my PC potentially failing during one of those six days per month.
Thx. I have read about duplicati issues and thats why I moved to Kopia. Duplicati is still doing smaller backups with no issues tho.
I know about KopiaUI on desktop, but can that run in server mode? Or do you connect to server using desktop app? I just start kopia web server when Im testing backups, but thats not the easiest way Id say.
I don’t run anything on the server because I don’t need to. I have my home server mounted as a network drive in Windows, so I just point Kopia’s database at a folder in there. It’s stored as an encrypted backup, and I’ve got the config for Kopia backed up in a few places (and the encryption key as well) so if the worst case scenario happens to my PC I’ll just reinstall Kopia on a fresh windows install + HDD, restore the config from the backup, then restore the backup.
I also have a backup target to an older 8TB drive that I leave with a friend and update whenever he visits for extra safety, if my whole apartment with my PC and server burns down I’ll at least be able to have an outdated snapshot and lose only a month or so instead of decades.
Thx for explaining, it makes sense. Ill just leave it in cli and start web server when needed so I can use chron job when PC is off. Its only few commands from nice GUI simmilar to desktop version.