Home

So, I have a VPS running some stuff, local proxmox-setup running something and then the ‘normal’ computers (laptop mostly) which I’d like to get a bit better backup solution for.

Proxmox VMs are taken care of by proxmox backup server and hetzner storagebox + nas at the separated garage, so they are decently protected against hardware failures. Workstations keep important files synced to nextcloud and the VPS has it’s own nightly snapshots at the provider, so there’s some reundancy in the system already. However, as we all know, two is one and one is none with backups, so I’d like to add a separate backup server in the mix.

As there’s devices which are not online all the time I’m leaning towards an agent-based solution where devices push their data to the backup server instead of server pulling the data in. Also as I have some spare capacity I’d like to have an option to offer backup storage for friends as well where agent-based solution is a practically requirement.

But now the difficult thing is to decide software for it. Veeam offers something for hobbyists, but I’d rather have more open solution. Bacula seems promising, but based on a quick read it doesn’t seem to be that simple to set up. Amanda looked good too, but that seems to be more or less abandoned project. Borg Backup would fill my own needs, but as friends tend to have either Windows or OSX that’s not quite what I’m after.

Any suggestions on what route I should take?

Kopia might meet your needs

https://kopia.io/

Kopia might meet your needs.

https://kopia.io/

(Edit, because I’ve got more time :)

• Runs on Windows and macOS
• Can run as client-server, or standalone, backing up to local, network, S3, WebDAV, various clouds, etc
• Open source
• Snapshots are incremental, encrypted, and deduplicated
• CLI and GUI

I’ve been happily using it for years for similar needs (mixed systems)

Borg an Restic should both be able to do that. I personally use Borg on my Storagebox and have scripts on all my devices that push periodic backups.

same, borg with borgmatic

Another vote for borg, I use a script and cron on the systems that aren’t in my proxmox host to trigger it and write to my NAS. There are windows GUIs for it, and you could also use WSL to run it.

But imo, backups should always be push, not pull. Makes it much easier to manage from my experience

Just do like Tieto and loose it. Dont worry, you are protected by mallicious compliance

Not from my wife if I lose our photo collection which has been building up since we got our first digital camera 20ish years ago.

I would try to avoid calling your wife mallicious compliance. There are pretty much always deviations to all plans, good or bad. In your case, do not let a Tieto curry team manage your data 😂

I have my shared data on Longhorn, so for services that’s just longhorn as a PVC on rke2(k8s) and for clients I expose the NFS for mounts from a longhorn PVC to them to mount to.

Kopia isn’t exactly agent based but you can at least change settings/policies for different machines if you use kopia server. I use it to have a global exclude list basically on the machines I back up.

??? What’s wrong with a simple cron job / systemd timer with a bash script?

No deduplication, encryption nor support for non-linux operating systems for a start.