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What do I backup and where?

I back up everything. I have a lot of time and memories invested in the data that I have curated over the years, and I have been bitten badly once, and lost a massive amount of data. Now I’m self-hosting,hosting soI want to make sure that everything is backed up somehow, somewhere. I use the Yunohost backup with a cron job for automatic back up to a USB drive and and Restic for a more granular, selective backup. I'll do a section later just on Restic and how I have set it up.

So I have the following:following in place:

  • A USB keyring that has the latest version of the Yunohost image. In the event of a total disaster, one that requires a complete rebuild, I can boot from the USB keyring and restore the system. I have a small wired keyboard and a tiny 8-inch monitor so I can do the necessary... I check every few months with the Yunohost website and grab the latest image and update the keyring. Every six months I plug everything up, the keyboard, monitor and boot from the keyring, just to make sure it all works. well you never know...
  • Two 2TB USB drives for backing up to. (Old fashioned spinners!)
    • One drive is labelled "YNHRECOVERY". This is where my server does its backup using my cron job from earlier.
    • The other is labeled "DATARECOVERY" Using Restic I copy the latest backup from the YNHRECOVERY to this drive, so now I have two copies of the full server on two separate drives.
  • An iDrive S3 account where I have three buckets.
    • ynh-idrive-s3: This is my yunohost offsite backup
    • my_laptop: I use Restic on my Mac and back up the whole of the home folder, with exclusions like the Library folder and a few other, like .Trash.
    • h_laptop: My partners laptop, which is a Mac gets the same backup.

 

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