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by temp2022account 1215 days ago
Seconded, I have an external 2tb HDD that stores 1 years worth of daily backups from my 256gb (~180gb used at any time) laptop hard drive. My backup script (https://gist.github.com/Jeffrey-P-McAteer/7d4b9052825914b5e0...) takes maybe 30 minutes for a full backup, 5 minutes for most deltas. Files which are the same get hard-linked to the previous days backups, new files are copied over and content-de-duped by btrfs.
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If nothing else, external hard drives are cheap and robust enough that I think more people should invest in having an offsite backup. Annually make a full backup, write the date on the outside, and leave it at the parents house. Make that your family holiday ritual.
As of recently, my setup for backups consists of 2x4 TB HDDs (from different manufacturers) with BTRFS in RAID 1, plugged into a small 2-drive USB3 docking station. With both checksumming and mirroring, feels pretty safe from HW-failure/bit rot standpoint (if one disk fails, you can still mount the other in "degraded" mode).