A few days ago, I posted this and quickly realized that the world of data backups is far richer than just sudo rsync -av --delete --exclude=Videos /home /home_bkup.

So now I'm window shopping the top Linux-supported backup solutions: borg, duplicacy, kopia, restic and--oh look--a core borg dev just dropped his own new-and-improved solution, vykar.

Restic was the first tool I started to research, and I thought I really liked it, got as far as installing, initializing a test repo, creating a couple of snapshots. But restic seems to be, hmm, fussy about the source and destination paths, absolute vs relative paths, etc.

The fact that merely renaming a parent directory (or grandparent, or great-grandparent, etc) causes restic to treat every unchanged byte below that as brand new ... that's a recipe for giant, bloated repos, and it's unacceptable to me ... and hey, lookit that, borg does not do that. So now, restic is out and borg is in.

But what other pros v cons are there, that I haven't even realized need to be considered? What advantages/disadvantages do other apps offer? Which ones can I easily automate with nightly/hourly cron jobs? Which ones have their own even-better automated solutions?

Do I even want encryption? All of my drives/volumes are LUKS encrypted, and anything I would store remotely would also get encrypted before it ever left my LAN ... plus, I'm just a bit nervous about having the backups encrypted, requiring working, functional software to restore/recover data from them....

That may not seem like such a big concern, perhaps, but I am currently working my way thru decrypting a bunch of 10-15 year old TrueCrypt-ed volumes, which requires using an old, outdated version of VeraCrypt and a somewhat "cross-my-fingers" effort to find KeePass repos old enough (also outdated, KeePass 1.0 repos) to still contain the various passwords I used to encrypt those ancient volumes ... but also still use new enough master passwords that I can still get the KeePass repos unlocked.

With rsync, I can literally just go into any backup, find the specific version of the specific file(s) I want to recover, and manually copy it back to my workspace. Is anything like that option available in any of these deduplicated/encrypted solutions, even if they're not encrypted? If (eg) a borg repo is created w/o encryption, the data is still all just borg-specific blobs, right? Or can I navigate into the repo and just manually grab files?

Oh yeah ... for reference, the past 10-ish years, my backup routine has been to create a new, dated, destination folder, starting with a full backup of my /home folder (excluding things like Videos, Music, VMs, other bulky stuff that gets backed up separately/differently), and then running nightly diff backups into the same folder, while also maintaining a "one-day-older" second backup of the whole thing on a 2nd HDD ... then, every 3-6 months, zipping up the current backup folder and starting a new one.

At any rate, there you go; that's the kind of stuff I'm thinking about now, as I overhaul my 20-year-old, 20TB (but could be 2TB) backup system.

Any and all feedback, recommendations, tips are welcome. Danke.

I am looking to replace my PC that I mostly use for gaming for close to 10 years. While I used to work in data centers, I've never been into building custom PC, particular the planning and research portion on what parts to get.

I am currently eyeing the Corsair build kit, and wonder if anyone has any experience to share.

Thanks in advance.

Pseudo because upgrading some of the parts might have a knock-on effect for other parts. Might end up leading to an upgrade of the whole system, idk. So here's a list of parts that I've already acquired. I was originally going to use some of them to fill out the Framework laptop that I pre-ordered... but I had an expensive couple of months earlier this year and figured I could wait on it. :(

Now here's what I have in my tower currently.

I'm looking to keep the tower at the very least and reuse it for new components. Right now, I know that the mobo will absolutely need to be replaced IF I'm throwing the ryzen chip in. And with knock-on effect, probably the psu as well since these components are drawing more power. The goal is to get a solid 60 fps on Helldivers (which I can't do at the moment, even on the lowest graphical settings) since it's the most intensive game that I play. With this goal in mind, does it make sense to start using the components I have from the first list, or might it be cheaper to keep them for the framework and get older (still compatible) parts that would fit right in to the system as it stands?

Please help lol