Hacker News Reader

Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

While we're on the topic of Duplicati, I feel the need to share my personal experience; one that's echoed by lots of folks online.

Duplicati restores can take what seems like the heat death of the universe to restore a repo as little as 500Gb. I've lost a laptop worth of files to it. You can find tonnes of posts on the Duplicati forums which retell the same story [0].

I've moved to Borg and backing up to a Hetzner Storage Box. I've restored many times with no issue.

Remember folks, test your backups.

[0] https://forum.duplicati.com/t/several-days-and-no-restore-fe...

View on HN

Same story, Hetzner storage box, local backups and at times a backup to my Android phone. Automated backup testing and a notification on Telegram if anything is amiss.

> Remember folks, test your backups.

Since you mention it, I am seizing the opportunity to ask: how should borg backup be tested ? Can it be automated ?

It's actually pretty simple using the check command [0]!

  borg check --verify-data REPOSITORY_OR_ARCHIVE

You can add that to a cron job.

Alternatively, I think the Vorta GUI also has a way to easily schedule it[1].

I'll add that one thing I like to do once in a blue-moon is to spin-up a VM and try to recover a few random files. While the check command checks that the data is there and theoretically recoverable, nothing really beats proving to yourself that you can, in a clean environment, recover your files.

[0] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/check.html

[1] https://vorta.borgbase.com/

> It's actually pretty simple using the check command [0]!

> borg check --verify-data REPOSITORY_OR_ARCHIVE

Thanks ! I thought there were some more convoluted process but I couldn't picture out anything except extracting the whole archives and check up by hand.

Yes, I have a bunch of scripts that allow me to pick a Borg snapshot and then do stuff with it. One such action is `borg export-tar` that just creates a TAR file containing a full self-sufficient snapshot of your stuff.

Then just listing the files in the archive is a not-bad way to find an obvious problem. Or straight up unpacking it.

But if you're asking about a separate parity file that can be used to check and correct errors -- I haven't done that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com