ok is there backup software that

  1. is a product i can spend money on and then use, as opposed to a hack i will be maintaining for the rest of my life
  2. doesn't suck to actually use, as opposed to Backblaze, which if I didn't preemptively pause it before doing anything network-based would render my internet connection basically inoperable and ignore me when i told it to stop doing that

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in reply to @cactus's post:

god, i have looked, and all companies seem to have abandoned turn-key backup software for some kind of broken cloud sync model a la google cloud / microsoft onedrive / icloud / etc

even mac's time machine is vestigial in that it doesn't work properly along with its cloud services, and stuff only gets backed up to time machine if it happens to have not been shunted into the cloud and off your machine first, and the snapshots dont understand when it disappears due to their cloud shenanigans

anyways, it all sucks ass, i wish i had a better recommendation for something that doesnt need you to be a part-time sysadmin for it

I didnt know rsync had a gui! oof yea. well. i think you can use ftp, like filezilla with them too? oh i remembered hetzner storage boxes are cheap for that kinda thing too

I second the recommendation for Arq. It is not a slam dunk — they experimented with an Electron app which was a DISASTER (Arq 6) and then they reverted back (Arq 7), the UI is kinda clunky but functional, and it’s somewhat of a subscription (your purchase gets 1 year of updates, after that you don’t even get bug fixes but you can still continue to use the last version within that year).

But you can back up locally, to a NAS (I use a 8 TB hard drive connected to a Raspberry Pi), to the cloud, it’s encrypted, and it has a pretty verbose log that will help you figure out errors when they happen.

for personal machines, it's really just all gone to shit in the past few years... i used to do some python backup thing and then when i moved to zfs i just did zfs send/recv but now that i'm on macos, well... at first i did time machine to my NAS and then zfs send/recv to/from that, but time machine makes huge disk images that don't diff cleanly and... so now i don't... really have backups of my machines? i just uh. do as much as i can on a network drive bc that gets backed up. but local data is just. too hard

I don't even know of any Linux backup solutions, even. Which is great, since that's what I use most of the time. Sure, my large storage volume exists in Windows, by virtue of winbtrfs, but that's not going to be great for backups I can use from either place. I guess I get to stick to being a sysadmin over random backup software. Or doing what I'm doing now, which is living by the seat of my pants and not backing up anything beside that which lives in my iCloud account and several Git hosts. Which Sucks.