On 8/9/21 1:47 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> "rsnapshot". Old, stable, and extremely effective at configuring backs
> of both system files and user data.

I second rsnapshot. Been using it for years and it is easy to set up 
Yearly/Monthly/Daily/Hourly backups and how many of each you want to 
keep. Since it uses symlinks, only the data changed takes up space.

Since I'm backing up a LOT of systems, I've got a dedicated server. But 
I've used it before on just a single laptop with an external drive.

The two cautions I'll give are:
* Have an off-site backup too. I have two external drives that I rotate 
weekly to a secure location (it can be your house) that just has the 
most current backup. The way I do it, if I lose /everything/ else then 
worst case scenario I still have my data as of two weeks ago. I have 
lived through a catastrophic failure and I did so with very little data 
loss.

* Backups can be very challenging. The more options you want and the 
more devices and the more OS's and the more things you want to tweak 
just make backup that much more complex. Pretty soon you find the only 
thing that matches your requirements are enterprise solutions like 
Bacula. Rsnapshot is simple and has several things you can tweak, but 
don't expect a lot of bells and whistles other then the basics. I've 
found that's true of most of the simple backup interfaces.

Good luck!
~Stack~