A backup routine I actually stick to

3 November 2025

I've lost data exactly once in a way that mattered, and that was enough. The lesson wasn't "make backups" — everyone knows that — it was that a backup you have to remember to run is a backup you don't have. The only routine that works is the one that runs without you.

My current setup is about as small as it gets. A scheduled job runs every night, snapshots the directories I care about, and pushes them to a bucket in another region. The tool does the deduplication and encryption; I just point it at a folder and stay out of the way.

restic backup ~/work ~/notes \
  --exclude-file ~/.config/restic/excludes \
  --tag nightly

Two things make this trustworthy rather than theatrical. First, the snapshots are deduplicated, so a nightly run only stores what actually changed — the cost of running it often is almost nothing. Second, everything is encrypted before it leaves the machine, so the offsite copy can live somewhere I don't fully control without me losing sleep.

The part everyone skips

A backup you've never restored from is a guess, not a backup. Once a month I pick a random snapshot and pull a few files out of it into a scratch folder, just to confirm the whole chain still works end to end. It takes five minutes and it has caught a misconfigured exclude rule more than once.

Backups are easy. Restores are the actual feature.

That's the entire system. It isn't clever, and that's the point — the clever version is the one I'd eventually stop running.