I have a confession to make.
I’ve been working in IT for about 6/7 years now and I’ve been selfhosting for about 5. And in all this time, in my work environment or at home, I’ve never bothered about backups. I know they are essential for every IT network, but I never cared to learn it. Just a few copies of some harddisks here and there and that is actually all I know. I’ve tried a few times, but I’ve often thought the learning curve to steep, or the commandline gave me some errors I didn’t want to troubleshoot.
It is time to make a change. I’m looking for an easy to learn backup solution for my home network. I’m running a Proxmox server with about 8 VMs on it, including a NAS full of photos and a mediaserver with lots of movies and shows. It has 2x 8TB disks in a RAID1 set. Next to that I’ve got 2 windows laptops and a linux desktop.
What could be a good backup solution that is also easy to learn?
I’ve tried Borg, but I couldn’t figure out all the commandline options. I’m leaning towards Proxmox Backup Server, but I don’t know if it works well with something other than my Proxmox server. I’ve also thought about Veeam since I encounter it sometimes at work, but the free version supports only up to 10 devices.
My plan now is to create 2 backup servers, 1 onsite, running on something like a raspberry pi or an HP elitedesk. The other would be an HP microserver N40L, which I can store offsite.
What could be the perfect backup solution for me?
EDIT:
After a few replies I feel the need to mention that I’m looking for a free and centrally managed option. Thanks!
Maybe have a look at urbackup. Gui, "centrally managed", free…
And please, as mentioned in another comment, have a look at Borgmatic. It makes Borg really easy to use and has some super handy features. Super easy backups to multiple locations by just adding a line in the config… And I just love the healthchecks integration. Set and forget until either healthchecks notifies you of a problem or you really need to recover data.
I'm gonna look into that! Borgmatic looks a lot easier than borg, but that CLI still scares me. I like working with Linux commands but something new like backups makes me want to click in a GUI to set everything up.
When I got started I preferred GUI apps too. The more you use them, the more you get to appreciate cli tools. Meanwhile I find cli tools better, they are just more precise and have a good way to push you to use them correctly. Also they are mostly well documented and even offer "on the fly" help with -h flags or alike… also the get started page of Borgmatic is really well written. Just play around with it ;)