I’m not going to lecture anyone about backups. I’m going to trust you already know you need backups and that you’re curious about how to set them up or you want to compare your setup to mine. Either way, you’re here now.
My setup is pretty straightforward. I repurposed an old NUC with an external SATA enclosure to act as the borg server. The external enclosure has four drives in a RAID-5, providing enough capacity for me to backup for a quite a while. In addition, I have the most important data replicated to object storage using rclone. This gives me multiple copies of data with multiple layers of protection, covering the 3-2-1 strategy for my most important data, and for the rest I am ok with the risk of loss.
Borg works off the principle of client-server, so the clients backup data to the “remote” borg server (it’s not actually remote, just at the other end of the house). If you aren’t familiar with borg, I highly encourage you to read the docs and have at least basic familiarity with it’s principle of operation.
My setup is loosely based on the configuration described here, so you may want to give that a read too if you like.
What and when to backup
I have a lot of things self-hosted in my home and on virtual machines in a couple of different services. I’m simply going to list a few of the things I backup, and leave you to evaluate what data you want backed up and where it’s at.