My Backup Strategy

Anthony Wang — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 11:48:06 -0600

Yesterday my friend wrote a blog post about their backup strategy so I guess I’ll do the same.

November was a data loss bonanza for me, both due to Saddam Hussein’s LinkedIn and an SSD failure, so I recently took some time to actually do backups properly. There are a gazillion backup tools out there, and I’ve tried a good chunk of them: rsync, rclone, bup, restic, duplicity…

But… they’re all wrong. There’s only ONE TRUE WAY to do backups, and that’s Btrfs send and receive. (Or ZFS. But I’ll focus on Btrfs in this post since that’s what I’m familiar with.) It’s super fast, efficient, and puts all these other tools to shame. Why? Because the filesystem itself knows exactly what’s changed between snapshots. It doesn’t use those puny stat abstractions that userspace tools are limited to. If you’re backing up one million files, all those other tools need to scan through all one million files to check if they’ve changed!

Cloud on Unnamed Website

My Backup Strategy