I’m using rustic, a lock-free rust-written drop-in-replacement of restic, which (I’m referring to restic and therefore in extension to rustic) supports always-encrypted, deduplicating, compressed and easy backups without you needing to worry about whether to do a full- or incremental-backup.

All my machines run hourly backups of all mounted partitions to an append-only repo at borgbase. I have a file with ignore pattern globs to skip unwanted files and dirs (i.e.: **/.cache).

While I think borgbase is ok, ther’re just using hetzner storage boxes in the background, which are cheaper if you use them directly. I’m thinking of migrating my backups to a handfull of homelabs from trusted friends and family instead.

The backups have a randomized delay of 5m and typically take about 8-9s each (unless big new files need to be uploaded). They are triggered by persistent systemd-timers.

The backups have been running across my laptop, pc and server for about 6 months now and I’m at ~380 GiB storage usage total.

I’ve mounted backup snapshots on multiple occasions already to either get an old version of a file, or restore it entirely.

There is a tool called redu which is like ncdu but works on restic/rustic repos. This makes it easy to identify which files blow up your backup size.