Backup up data
Posted on March 20, 2021
For about 10 years now, I have been using Dropbox as a tool to synchronize data
between my work desktop and my laptop. I do a local backup using
rsnapshot, but they were only stored locally on my desktop. So,
effectively, I had been relying on Dropbox as a backup solution. Every so
often, I read horror stories that Dropbox is not a backup solution.
And every time I would read one of these reports, I would think, “Hmm… maybe
I should start using a proper backup solution.” I finally bit the bullet and
purchased some storage from rsync.net and set up a back up
system. Yay!
I chose rsync.net because they have a completely no nonsense website (no marketing gimmicks and an honest technical description of what they provide). And I have read many blogs and posts where people recommend rsync.net, and I have never read a negative review.
My current synchronization setup is as follows. There are two directories that
I sync between my desktop and laptop: Projects (which contains my active
projects) and backup (which contains zipped copies of my old projects).
The Projects directory is sym-linked to Dropbox directory, and key in sync
via Dropbox. The backup directory is kept in sync via unison (which I find
to be faster than raw rsync) and cron.
It was relatively easy to add rsync.net as another synchronization
host. To do that, I created a file $HOME/.unison/rsync.prf on my desktop:
root = /home/username
root = ssh://user@user.rsync.net
force = /home/username
path = backup
path = Dropbox
log = true
logfile = .unison/rsync.log
batch = true
ignore = Path Dropbox/.dropbox
ignore = Path Dropbox/.dropbox.cache
Most of the preferences are pretty self explanatory. The only non-obvious line
is force = /home/username, which tells unison that in case of a file
conflict, overwrite the file from my desktop to rsync.net. This is slightly
risky, but rsync.net provides daily snapshots for 7 days, so I should be able
to recover from accidental deletions. I have only had the account for less
than 24hrs, so the automatic snapshot hasn’t kicked in yet. I’ll see how it
looks; otherwise, I’ll also backup the rsnapshot snapshots to rsync.net.
Now, one difficulty was that my desktop is running Arch Linux. So I had the
latest version of unison (version 2.51.2), while rsync.net is running
version 2.40.63. And unison refuses to sync with different versions of
unison on the client and the server.
Fortunately, there is a package on AUR (isn’t that always the case),
which installs the pre-built binary from debian. Fortunately, debian’s
repository, had version 2.40.102 of unison, so I could easily
install that using the AUR package (which installs the binary as unison-2.40
to avoid any clashes with the default version).
Now, I needed to do was run
$unison-2.40 rsync
to sync my desktop to rsync.net. I added the following to my crontab -e
file:
5 */6 * * * unison-2.40 rsync
which runs unison every six hours (at 5 minutes past the hour).
And Voilà! Now all my work projects are backup up on rsync.net. That was not
too difficult to set up.
Now all I need to do is to figure out a backup strategy for my photos and videos which are currently all on Google Photos.
This entry was posted in Backup and tagged rsync.net, unison, dropbox, cron.