[0xbadcafebee]

It's kind of ridiculous that there is better tooling for Kubernetes to sync files two ways than there is for the Linux desktop. Rclone is a maze of options, which vary based on version/distro. The configurator is a slow readline console script without enough information. The one decent GUI for Rclone has been abandoned, and despite being able to save "tasks", had no ability to just... schedule one every 10 minutes. And yet if you go into most distros and look at packaged Internet apps, or things on Flatpak, you will find 1,000 different open source GUIs for an RSS reader, BitTorrent client, or chat client.

I would love it if there were some kind of "Linux Desktop co-op", with a couple of staff. Users pay membership dues, vote on apps/features, and some devs get paid to develop it, in addition to "resume fame" that can translate over to a higher paying gig. But something tells me the Linux Desktop is so small and nerd-focused that we'd just end up funding more RSS readers and chat clients.

[RockRobotRock]

I'm not sure what you're on about. This started as a rant on rclone's CLI options, but ended on desktop Linux.

rclone is mostly the work of one guy. You can donate to him if you'd like. Making a GUI for a complex, rapidly evolving CLI is not an easy thing to do. There's probably a hundred different attempts to make a good interface for ffmpeg, but you can't please everyone.

[darthrupert]

Syncthing?

[nine_k]

Syncthing is great, but it's peer to peer, and it requires block storage ("filesystem"). It also has no idea of point-in-time snapshots. Syncthing, is, as is unison, rsync, etc, basically a mirroring tool.

By contrast, Borg, Restic, Kopia (anything else?) use object storage, aka binary blobs, like S3 or R2 or One Drive. They store both entire copies and small diffs on top of them, much like video codecs, or like git. You can look at the filesystem you've backed up as it was in a particular moment, and you may have a history of many such moments, say, daily snapshots for a month, stored economically, not as 30 full copies. And it all is encrypted on top. If your source FS supports snapshots (ZFS, XFS on LVM, BTRFS), your backups can be entirely consistent views of your filesystem, of its relevant subtrees.

[oever]

This is how I run backups privately and at work: hourly local snapshots with btrbk and hourly remote backups of filesystem snapshots with Borg. The local snapshots backups are great for quick restores or finding out recent file changes.

Prometheus alerts check that latest backup is at most two hours old and that the filesystem is not reporting errors. This setup running for more than a year now and gives great peace of mind.

[nine_k]

That's an appreciable integrity assurance!

Mine is simpler: Syncthing with staggered versioning for important data, periodic Restic backups of the home directory (excluding caches), keeping several recent backups and a couple of older backups.

I've restored from these backups 4 times, both due to crashes and when moving to a new machine, without any adventures in the process.

[TiredOfLife]

https://docs.syncthing.net/users/versioning.html

[nine_k]

Indeed; I know and use it. But it's per file, and not very configurable.

It's not very helpful is you e.g. have a 1 GB file that gets appended 100 kB every day; Syncthing would store a new full-size copy in each version (immediately usable), while Borg / Restic / Kopia would only store the deltas (and would require slow mounting to access a particular version).

Different tools for different jobs.

[dddw]

NextCloud?