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While we're on the topic of Duplicati, I feel the need to share my personal experience; one that's echoed by lots of folks online. Duplicati restores can take

While we're on the topic of Duplicati, I feel the need to share my personal experience; one that's echoed by lots of folks online. Duplicati restores can take what seems like the heat death of the universe to restore a repo as little as 500Gb. I've lost a laptop worth of files to it. You can find tonnes of posts on the Duplicati forums which retell the same story [0]. I've moved to Borg and backing up to a Hetzner Storage Box. I've restored many times with no issue. Remember folks, test your backups. [0] https://forum.duplicati.com/t/several-days-and-no-restore-feedback/5396 https://forum.duplicati.com/t/several-days-and-no-restore-fe...

johnchristopher 3y ago
> Remember folks, test your backups. Since you mention it, I am seizing the opportunity to ask: how should borg backup be tested ? Can it be automated ?
- jszymborski 3y ago
  It's actually pretty simple using the check command [0]! borg check --verify-data REPOSITORY_OR_ARCHIVE You can add that to a cron job. Alternatively, I think the Vorta GUI also has a way to easily schedule it[1]. I'll add that one thing I like to do once in a blue-moon is to spin-up a VM and try to recover a few random files. While the check command checks that the data is there and theoretically recoverable, nothing really beats proving to yourself that you can, in a clean environment, recover your files. [0] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/check.html https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/check.html [1] https://vorta.borgbase.com/ https://vorta.borgbase.com/
  - johnchristopher 3y ago
    > It's actually pretty simple using the check command [0]! > borg check --verify-data REPOSITORY_OR_ARCHIVE Thanks ! I thought there were some more convoluted process but I couldn't picture out anything except extracting the whole archives and check up by hand.
- pdimitar 3y ago
  Yes, I have a bunch of scripts that allow me to pick a Borg snapshot and then do stuff with it. One such action is `borg export-tar` that just creates a TAR file containing a full self-sufficient snapshot of your stuff. Then just listing the files in the archive is a not-bad way to find an obvious problem. Or straight up unpacking it. But if you're asking about a separate parity file that can be used to check and correct errors -- I haven't done that.
flagged24 3y ago
Same story, Hetzner storage box, local backups and at times a backup to my Android phone. Automated backup testing and a notification on Telegram if anything is amiss.

johnchristopher 3y ago

> Remember folks, test your backups. Since you mention it, I am seizing the opportunity to ask: how should borg backup be tested ? Can it be automated ?

jszymborski 3y ago
It's actually pretty simple using the check command [0]! borg check --verify-data REPOSITORY_OR_ARCHIVE You can add that to a cron job. Alternatively, I think the Vorta GUI also has a way to easily schedule it[1]. I'll add that one thing I like to do once in a blue-moon is to spin-up a VM and try to recover a few random files. While the check command checks that the data is there and theoretically recoverable, nothing really beats proving to yourself that you can, in a clean environment, recover your files. [0] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/check.html https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/check.html [1] https://vorta.borgbase.com/ https://vorta.borgbase.com/
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  > It's actually pretty simple using the check command [0]! > borg check --verify-data REPOSITORY_OR_ARCHIVE Thanks ! I thought there were some more convoluted process but I couldn't picture out anything except extracting the whole archives and check up by hand.
pdimitar 3y ago
Yes, I have a bunch of scripts that allow me to pick a Borg snapshot and then do stuff with it. One such action is `borg export-tar` that just creates a TAR file containing a full self-sufficient snapshot of your stuff. Then just listing the files in the archive is a not-bad way to find an obvious problem. Or straight up unpacking it. But if you're asking about a separate parity file that can be used to check and correct errors -- I haven't done that.

flagged24 3y ago

Same story, Hetzner storage box, local backups and at times a backup to my Android phone. Automated backup testing and a notification on Telegram if anything is amiss.