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My Backup Infrastructure, 2025 Edition

borretti.me · 847 words · saved by 1 readers

I’m finally satisfied with my infrastructure for backups, so I’m writing it up so others can benefit from it. My requirements for backup infrastructure are: The one non-criterion is portability. Because I only use macOS, I don’t need a solution where I can restore the backups from different operating systems. I have two portable SSDs, Chiron and Nessus, with encrypted APFS. The filesystem itself being encrypted is extremely convenient: I just plug them in, and the macOS keychain has the keys. There’s no possibility of accidentally leaking cleartext into the disk because the encryption is transparent. I use rsync to synchronize the laptop to the disks. The specific incantation is: Which recursively copies the contents of ~/Root into /Volumes/Chiron/Root, preserving permissions/times/the executable flag, using checksums rather than heuristics to see which files have changed, and deleting files that exist in the target but not the source. Note that in rsync, trailing slashes matter! rsync

tl;dr two portable SSDs, synced with rsync ; and a Backblaze bucket synced with restic : I’m finally satisfied with my infrastructure for backups, so I’m writing it up so others can benefit from it. Criteria My requirements for backup infrastructure are: Open source, to minimize the risk of backdoors. Fast, but only incrementally: an initial snapshot can be slow. Simple configuration, with little surface area to mess things up. Encryption with keys that I control and which never leave my device. Ideally, encryption should be mandatory, to prevent accidentally putting cleartext on backup media.

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