I have two HDDs in my system (one is 3TB, the other’s 2TB), and an external 1TB drive.
I have had Arch installed on an SSD for about 2 years with one filesystem at /.
I’d like to do two things:
Have a backup of my /home directory on the external drive.
Have the two internal HDDs be mirrored (I use one for large file storage).
Right now I have shell scripts which run rsync commands to backup all the drives, but this is insanely slow. I don’t know much about filesystem management, but I’d love to learn!
Fellow rsync script owner here
Having rsync running against a machine with zfs and snapshots very well knowing that there are other tools that could do the same / better job.
Have a look at https://www.borgbackup.org/ if you are interested in incremental backups, even if you are not going to use it for that use case.
To mirror for the disk I would put /home on a dedicated partition and either use mdadm, or ZFS.
I would even vote on switching to ZFS nowadays, setup a ZFS mirror - requirement are same-size disks and gives other nice features out of the box. (having ZFS would allow attaching an external disk and letting it resilver/resync all its data/snapshots)
I don’t have this setup on any Arch, only FreeBSD. There will for sure be someone in the forum that can give hands on experience and help with a proper setup.
what_to_backp="/home/user/.password-store /home/user/Documents"
where_to="/mnt/localdisk2/backups/ srv1:/backups_mylaptop/ srv2:/data/backups_laptop"
for srv in $where_to; do
echo "[I] Starting backing up to: $srv"
for src_foldr in $what_to_backp; do
echo "[I] Starting backup of: $src_foldr"
rsync -avzh --progress $src_foldr $remote
done
echo
done
Is it decade old and ugly: yes
does it delete old files: no
does it allow me to rollback to an older “version” of data: no
would I recommend anyone adding an @daily cron: no
would i recommend BORG instead: definitely, yes