Re: Versioning & Deduplication

[feklee (Felix E. Klee)]

@gadget

Since you already automatically back up with Restic, and you’re using Linux, have you considerd NILFS?: https://nilfs.sourceforge.io/

Thanks again for this suggestion! Yesterday, I finally finished the setup on my Linux server: RAID1/LUKS/NILFS2

I have decided to not turn on Syncthing versioning. I trust versioning in the file system more.

Originally, I wanted to run Dropbox in parallel for a while, but that only works with EXT4, and so it had to go. I have more than 2TB of data. After testing Syncthing for ten months, I am confident that it is up for the task.

@mopani

ZFS snapshots can be run very frequently, but if you need to later list the snapshots it can be a chore to sort through them to find the snapshot you want to pull from.

That issue, of course, also exists with NILFS. Normally I would use it if I accidentally damage a file and then need to go back. In that case, I can just estimate the time, open the snapshot, and pick it from there. I’ll see how it goes. In addition, I have a daily Restic backup.

Good things about NILFS are that it is part of the Linux kernel and that I don’t need to schedule the snapshoting. The file system regularly creates so called checkpoints, which can retroactively be turned into snapshots and mounted read-only.

[mopani]

Interesting. I had never heard of NILFS, looks like something I want to learn more about.