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Comment by mike31fr | Hacker News Reader

An item on my todo list reads "Setup a backup system using Borg". I didn't know about Rclone but it seems very good, so now I want to rename my todo list item as "Setup a backup system using Rclone". How would you compare these 2 solutions?

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rclone is not a proper backup tool. It's like an rsync that integrates with all the clouds. You can kinda use it as one though. I had Borg in my todo for a long time too -- experimented with it and restic which are proper backup tools -- they are a little more involved than rclone (and scary, as they can get corrupted and you are essentially reliant on the software to get your files back). I found rclone much simpler to work with. As they always say, any backup is better than no backup!

The simplest thing you can probably do is use rclone to copy your most important files to a B2 bucket. Enable Object-lock on the B2 bucket to ensure no deletion just to be safe. You can then run rclone on server and from your devices with cron jobs to archive your important stuff. This is not a proper backup as I said, if you rename files or delete unwanted stuff it wont leave on the backup bucket but it's usable for stuff like photos and the like, anything you don't want to lose.

(I lied, simplest thing is actually probably just copying to an external hard drive, but I find having rclone cron jobs much more practical)

Thank you so much! It really helps. My data is on a Synology NAS. It seems B2 buckets support is built into the Hyper Backup Synology software (the one whose purpose it to perform backups), I'm not sure if I am going to chose that or Rclone. But I already found some resources (https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/hsy29y/hyper_back...), I'll investigate that. Do you, by chance, also perform your backups from a Synology NAS?

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