Backup before it's too late

A few months ago, a brand-new SSD that was running for less than 6 months died on me. Luckily there wasn’t any important data on it, so I just cursed the manufacturer and my luck and moved on.

However, a silly question got stuck in the back of my mind: when will my other drives fail, causing irrecoverable data loss?

That made me spend a few hours a day checking my options of cross-platform backup solutions that were out there.

Previously I’ve used Borg and as far as I remember, it got the job done.

But I stumbled on a project I’d almost forgotten about: Restic. Restic has gone a long way development-wise, and new features are being actively added.

I’ve decided to use S3 since it’s fairly cheap per TB. After looking at providers, I demoed Backblaze coming in at $6/TB/month.

Since restic is written in Golang, you can compile binaries for all major platforms, making it ideal for multi-arch scenarios such as my home lab.

Set up a cronjob or systemd timer to backup directories you want, add custom tags to each backup for better management, and let it rip.