Currently I'm just using bare rclone to backup to my own remote machines, but obviously this isn't very professional solution. Was thinking to add Backblaze B2 as a remote, but I guess using rclone wouldn't be a state-of-the-art solution here. After all, it isn't really a backup tool, is it? It has some built-in encryption, but it's a bit clunky, and I'd think a proper backup tool should automatically divide data into blocks of suitable size (instead of just creating file-per-file - to make it S3/B2 API-friendly), encode whole directories as tar (if needed to preserve links, for example), do deduplication, and whatever else are best practices I have no idea about, but which backup-proficient people probably invented long time ago.
Does anybody have a recommendation?
I briefly looked at restic and duplicati, but surprisingly none are as simple to use as I'd expect a dedicated backup-tool to be (I don't need, and kindda don't want GUI, I'd like all configuration to be stored in a single config-file I can just back-up to a different location like everything else, and re-create on any new machine). More than that, I've read some scary stories about these tools fucking up their indexes so that data turns out to be non-restorable, which sounds insane, since this is something you must be absolutely sure your backup-tool would never do no matter what, because what's even the point of making backups then.
>I'd like all configuration to be stored in a single config-file I can just back-up to a different location like everything else, and re-create on any new machine
You might want to look into kopia. It accomplishes the same task as restic, but handles configs in a way you might find more appealing. Further reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34154052
Don't even bother with duplicati. I've tried to make it work so many times, but it's just a buggy mess that always fails. It's a shame too, because I really like the interface.
I've been using bupstash since trying to do backups on an rpi and finding Borg too slow to be usable. Since then I upgraded to a proper server at home but kept bupstash as I found it to just work better for the most part.
Keep in mind there's not been much progress since the last release two years ago and its still tagged as beta by the author. Tbf I think he has a higher quality standard than in other projects that are not tagged as such.
Whether something is simple or not I'd say depends on the use case. But I found borg to be great. I'd recommend you check it out and go through the quickstart guide in the documentation. It does de-duplication and encryption. It does a lot more but you don't have to use those features if you don't need them. I couple it with borgmatic to implement a backup and disaster recovery procedure that is meant to decrease the risk of data loss. I also use borgbase and they have a good service but using something like B2 with this rclone support would result in a cheaper alternative if you don't need the extra that borgbase provides.
I've been using it for quite a while now both for my personal projects and paid work and have had a good experience with it.
Borg 2 is still beta and Kopia is also there. But it's newer so I am testing it on another redundant backup on the same machine. I have space so why not?
Every once in a while I run integrity check (with data) so I can trust that metadata and data are fine.
I'm very happy with Restic backing up to BackBlaze B2.
I have a "config file", which is really just a shell script to set up the environment (repository location, etc), run the desired backups, and execute the appropriate prune command to implement my desired retention schedule.
I've been using this setup for years with great success. I've never had to do a full restore, but my experience restoring individual files and directories has been fine.
Do you have any links related to the index corruption issue? I've never encountered it, but obviously a sample size of one isn't very useful.
Does anybody have a recommendation?
I briefly looked at restic and duplicati, but surprisingly none are as simple to use as I'd expect a dedicated backup-tool to be (I don't need, and kindda don't want GUI, I'd like all configuration to be stored in a single config-file I can just back-up to a different location like everything else, and re-create on any new machine). More than that, I've read some scary stories about these tools fucking up their indexes so that data turns out to be non-restorable, which sounds insane, since this is something you must be absolutely sure your backup-tool would never do no matter what, because what's even the point of making backups then.