I’m trying to find a good method of making periodic, incremental backups. I assume that the most minimal approach would be to have a Cronjob run rsync periodically, but I’m curious what other solutions may exist.
I’m interested in both command-line, and GUI solutions.
Get a Mac, use Time Machine. Go all in on the eco system. phone, watch, iPad, tv. I resisted for years but it’s so good man and the apple silicon is just leaps beyond everything else.
Time Machine is not a backup, it is unreliable. I’ve had corrupted time machine backups and its backups are non-portable: You can only read the backups using an Apple machine. Apple Silicon is also not leaps beyond everything else, a 7000-series AMD chip will trade blows on performance per watt given the same power target. (source: I measured it, 60 watt power limit on a 7950X will closely match a M1 ultra given the same 60 watts of power)
Sure their laptops are tuned better out of the box and have great battery life, but that’s not because of the Apple Silicon. Apple had good battery life before, even when their laptops had the same Intel chip as any other laptop. Why? Because of software.
Like before, their new M-chips are nothing special. Apple Silicon chips are great, but so are other modern chips. Apple Silicon is not “leaps beyond everything else”.
If you look past their shiny fanboy-bait chips, you realize you pay **huge ** markups on RAM and storage. Apple’s RAM and storage isn’t anything special, but they’re a lot more expensive than any other high-end RAM and storage modules, and it’s not like their RAM or storage is better because, again, an AMD chip can just use regular RAM modules and an NVME SSD and it will match the M-chip performance given the same power target. Except you can replace the RAM modules and the SSD on the AMD chipset for reasonable prices.
In the end, a macbook is a great product and there’s no other laptop that really gets close to its performance given its size. But that’s it, that’s where Apple’s advantage ends. Past their ultra-light macbooks, you get overpriced hardware, crazy expensive upgrades, with an OS that isn’t better, more reliable or more stable than Windows 11 (source: I use macOS and Windows 11 daily). You can buy a slightly thicker laptop (and it will still be thin and light) with replacable RAM and SSD and it will easily match the performance of the magic M1 chip with only a slight reduction in potential battery life. But guess what: If you actually USE your laptop for anything, the battery life of any laptop will quickly drop to 2-3 hours at best.
And that’s just laptops. If you want actual work done, you get a desktop, and for the price of any Apple desktop you can easily get any PC to outperform it. In some cases, you can buy a PC to outperform the Apple desktop AND buy a macbook for on the go, and still have money left over. Except for power consumption ofcourse, but who cares about power consumption on a work machine? Only Apple fanboys care about that, because that’s the only thing they got going for them. My time is more expensive than my power bill.
I don’t. I lose my data like all the cool (read: fool) kids.
Good ol’ fashioned rsync once a day to a remote server with zfs with daily zfs snapshot (rsync.net). Very fast because it only need to send changed/new files, and saved my hide several times when I need to access deleted files or old version of some files from the zfs snapshots.
I have scripts scheduled to run rsync on local machines, which save incremental backups to my NAS. The NAS in turn is incrementally backed up to a remote server with Borg.
Not all of my machines are on all the time so I also built in a routine which checks how old the last backup is, and only makes a new one if the previous backup is older than a set interval.
I also save a lot of my config files to a local git repo, the database of which is regularly dumped and backed up in the same way as above.
Exactly like you think. Cronjob runs a periodic rsync of a handful of directories under /home. My OS is on a different drive that doesn’t get backed up. My configs are in an ansible repository hosted on my home server and backed up the same way.
