I’m planning to set up proper backups for my server, but I’m not sure which software to use. I’ve looked for solutions with encryption, compressed, incremental backups. These seem to be the best options:
Does anyone have experience with these, and if so, what was your experience?
EDIT 2023-12-28:
It seems most people are using Restic of which about half mention using a wrapper such as resticprofiles, creatic and autorestic.
| Borg | Restic | Kopia |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | 7 | 5 |
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I tried Borg for a brief moment when I used the Nextcloud AiO Container and it has Borg Backup integrated into it.
But then I tried Kopia and sticked to it. I wanted a unified backup solution for all my systems (Linux + Windows) and Kopia is doing that. Also it has a nice Web Interface and GUI Client, so it´s usable even for the people not that tech-savvy.
My Homelab runs 2 Kopia Containers at the moment. The first one is here to backup all my compose files and the Docker volumes. The second one is backing up my NAS to a cloud storage. I can access these 2 via the Web GUI, which is very convenient. And when I need to restore something, I can mount the Repo and just restore what I need. To test my Homelab Backup, I spun up a Linux VM, installed Docker + Kopia CLI to restore everything and all my containers were up and running again.
On my Windows Systems I run Kopia GUI which can connect to multiple Repositories. So my Desktops backup up to my NAS and to a Cloud storage at the moment. So they run basically 2 Backup jobs (which only take a few minutes each when run once a week). But there is also a feature that a Kopia Repo Server syncs its Repo to another Repo, so this could have been a solution too. That way your system creates a Backup only once and Kopia takes care of synchronizing the existing Repo to an additional place.
I tried borg (with borgmatic) and restic - personally I like restic a bit more. There are lots of comparisons between these tools and your use case might differ, but for me restic just seems a bit more modern: It supports more remote targets (e.g. S3), multithreading, better encryption and it’s written in Go.
That being said, borg is not bad software. It’s reliable and I actually still use it for a ~20TB repository that I couldn’t be bothered to migrate yet. It’s just that for me restic felt slightly better overall.
I started out with borg. Basically had no problems with it. Then i moved to Restic. For the past few years i am using it, i never experienced any issue with it. Can only recommend Restic.
Why can you not recommend Borg then?
I’m a Borg user and I think it works really well. Reliable after you make a cronjob for it, deduplicated, compressed, encrypted backups. Restoring works pretty good too, can be slow at times, but that’s an effect of the aforementioned.
If you want to Backup your GUI machines, I’d recommend vorta (a GUI for Borg) instead of manually making crown jobs for Borg.
Of course it works to Backup on remote machines with ssh/sftp (and probably other protocols too, but that’s what I use)
Many things said here.
I might add that I like the portability of the single binary of kopia and restic.
I usuall recommend kopia for the not so tech savvy peoply and restic if cli is enough.
I have no experience with kopia in that regard but restic can be memory hungry especially with a lot of snapshots or many small files.
The 20 TB of data which someone mentioned here may require a lot of memory for restic and can be quite a challenge for many machines.
