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!
Kopia is my favorite by far!
It's super fast and has tons of great features including cutting-edge encryption and several compression options.
It has a GUI and is cross-platform.
It can do both cloud and local/network backups.
That includes locally mounted disks, SFTP, rsync, or any network share/etc accessible from your machine as well as many cloud options.
The de-duplication stuff is also killer. If you upload the same file (or chunk of data) in different folders or even from different systems it will map them to the same backup storage potentially saving you a ton of storage space.
It also uses a rolling hash system so if you modify just a handful of megabytes from a 25GB file many times, only the megabytes of changes will need to be backed up to store the version history. You do not need to store 25GB every time you modify that file.
There's a ton of other goodies as well!
And it's all FOSS!
I use it to backup to an external hard drive, a NAS, and to Amazon S3. You can configure multiple repositories like that and have them all run at the same time (subject to their individual scheduling policies of course)