Restic and borg are the best I’ve tried for remote, encrypted backups.

I personally use Restic for my remote backups and rsync for my local.

Restic beats out borg for me because there are a lot more compatible storage options.

I have no relevant data locally. My Documents is a symlink to a Nextcloud directory running on my Synology NAS on a RAID1 that backups to cloud storage via one of their tools (forgot which one).

I never liked having to backup working machines. If it breaks I'm fine with having to install again. I won't lose data though.

I do 2 backups

Veeam system image daily; this is a fully bootable image of every drive on my system, kept for things like hardware failure or "oops" moments. It just goes to my NAS for fast local storage.

Online backup of important files daily; this has changed a few times, I was using Restic to B2, then Duplicati to Wasabi S3, now I'm using iDrive to see how that is.

My favorite tools are definitely Veeam and Duplicati, because they both have a good UI and are easy to use, both automatically run in the background and handle scheduling entirely on their own. Browsing snapshots is easy and finding the files you want at a specific date/time is quick.

Restic and Kopia I've used as well, they're much harder to use especially for restores, finding files is a nightmare via CLI. Scheduling is a pretty involved step, and you have to figure out how to run them in the background yourself. Both also performed really slowly for me on my ~3TB backup set of about 50k files, compared to Veeam and Duplicati which are very fast.

I just map my documents, pictures and other important home folders to subfolders inside Dropbox. This propagates all of my files across all of my computers and makes everything accessible from my phone as well.

I don't worry about backing up my operating system, though important configuration file locations are also mapped into Dropbox for easily setting things up again. Complete portable apps are also located in Dropbox.

KDE user so for my personal files I backup with both Kups and Bups (install both) and you get the choice of cloning type or only changed files with going back in time choices. Integrates into KDE taskbar/system settings.

For redundancy, I back up my main sync folder on the desktop to my laptop using Syncthing over my WiFi/network.

Duplicity over SSH to my backup NAS, which then backs up to a cloud service iDrive weekly.

My phone and tablet are both Samsung, which uses OneDrive for backups

IDrive Cloud Backup

Enterprise Class Cloud Backup for PCs, Macs, Servers, Laptops, NAS and Mobile Devices

^{www.idrive.com}

I've used a combination of

• Managing ZFS snapshots with pyznap
• Plain old rsync to copy important files that happen not to be on ZFS filesystems to ZFS.

If I were doing this over today, I'd probably consider zrepl.github.io/ instead of pyznap, as pyznap is no longer receiving real active development.

In the past I've used rdiff-backup, which is great but it's hard to beat copy-on-write snapshots for speed and being lightweight.

I’ve recently started using proxmox -backup-client. Works well. Goes to my backup server along with my vm image backups. Works nicely with full deducing and such. Quite good savings if you are backing up multiple machines.

I the. Rsync this up to cloud once a day.

I am using Borg for years. So far, the tool has not let me down. I store the backups on external hard drives that are only used for backups. In addition, I save really important data at rsync.net and at Hetzer in a storage box. Which is not a problem because Borg automatically encrypts locally and for decryption in my case you need a password and a key file.

Generally speaking, you should always test whether you can restore data from a backup. No matter which tool you use. Only then you have a real backup. And an up-to-date backup should always additionally be stored off-site (cloud, at a friend's or relative's house, etc.). Because if the house burns down, the external hard drive with the backups next to the computer is not much use.

By the way, I would advise against using just rsync because, as the name suggests, rsync only synchronizes, so you don't have multiple versions of a file. Which can be useful if you only notice later that a file has become defective at some point.

At this moment I use too many tools.

For user data on my PC and on home server I mostly use Duplicacy. It is fast and efficient.
All data backed up locally on NAS box over SFTP, and a subset of that data is backed up to S3 cloud storage.

I have a Mac, this one is using TimeMachine, storing data on NAS, then it's synced to S3 cloud storage one a day.

And on top of that VMs and containers from home server are backed up by Proxmox built in tool to NAS. These mostly exclude user data.

Duplicacy

A new generation cross-platform cloud backup tool

^{duplicacy.com}

An external hard drive works 100%. And relying on .dotfiles to redownload the whole thing back.

...I mean, it takes like less than 3 minutes to redownload and 5 reconfiguring everything manually, so eh.