I have daily backups, weekly, monthly and yearly. All but yearly is deleted after a certain time, but yearly I keep forever.

I learned I pretty much never need old data for my hobby selfhosting stuff. So I do 4 weeks. I'll notice if something breaks within 4 weeks and fix it. I occasionally do manual backups, for example when migrating stuff and keep them for longer. And I got some old stuff like in xkcd 1360.

I suppose I could do more, but I also want the privacy policy of my online services to say: x weeks and all the logs and unnecessary data is gone.

Backups?

I was backing up multiple places on my LAN but than half of my place flooded, so lamenat and carpet was ripped up, one of my pi 5’s was misplaced with a NVMe drive and another was lost. Than just down the street 3 house went up in flames had the wind been blowing just a little south my condo complex would have been burnt to the ground. After the fire fighters were telling us to get back further and further I had my main pi 5 that had all the backups of everything important on another NVMe drive and a few other things ready to go if the firefighters started banging on my door telling me it was time to leave. I wish I could honestly say that was the day I decided to get a VPS and start my back up, but I was still hoping my father would let me set up a pi with a drive big enough to do back ups at his place. It sounds like he will but he is concerned about security risks about my VPN, funny thing is my back up pi would be the most secure thing hooked up to his modem/router and I wouldn’t want his stuff touching my stuff and with how my LAN and VPN are set up they would have a hard time doing it. Anywho I have a domain hosted by EasyDNS, and just went and looked at their VPS options and got some year long plan and set up cron jobs to take the stuff I want to backup and use age to encrypt it and than it is sent to my VPS each age container is than deleted after there is something of the same name but 3 days iterations older and deletes it.

I use nightly backups. I keep them 2 weeks.

After that I keep a weekly backup for 2 months.

After that I keep a monthly backup for 2 years.

I keep my yearly backups forever.

where we're going, we don't need backups!

[forget]
keep-daily = 10
keep-weekly = 4

Daily backups are cheap because of de-duplication. I keep a few weekly backups in case it takes me a bit to notice something went wrong. I don't usually back up logs.

I could probably drop the weekly backups without much risk, but I've got the space.

My VPS gets a weekly rsync to my home server. I keep ten deduplicated copies for weeks gone by. The current week also gets synced off-site with encryption.

For frequently changing data hourly up to 24, daily up to 7, weekly upto 4, monthly up to 12.

For daily changing data daily up to 7 and etc. as above.

For seldom changing data a backup every 3 days with rotation based on a storage quota, and retention of manually held samples.

Daily for 10 days, 4 weekly, 4 monthly.

That covers me from broken updates, generally.

As long as I have space. My backups are on dedicated drives, and as they run out of space the old ones are deleted.

Always last daily, weekly, monthly. The others are pointers (hardlinks). How many years, i'm not there yet.

I know I’ll get shot for this, but I stopped backing up a long time ago.

I was doing it at home because I do it at work and it’s the done thing. But when I stopped to think about it, I realised I don’t have anything at home that actually matters. If I lose my Plex library it’s ok.

Let me put it this way: I have a removable harddisk with my files from the universities' VAX 11/780 in storage. Long enough?

I use bormatic, I can go back about 60 days and have needed to a few times in the past due to my own mistakes. Server is in the basement, it backs up toy living room TV pc which is on the top floor. My upload speed is too slow for offsite backups.

7 backups, though the frequency they're taken (daily Vs weekly Vs monthly) depends on the service.

Why don't you exclude logs from your backups? databases sure yes that's where the real info is (not sure why you don't consider it real data) but logs are useless outside of the current running instance.

For configs I use Home Manager on a public Git repo. And for everything else I use Pika Backup.

As of now, i keep them basically for ever, but granularity gets less over time. (restic forget)

Before you go nuts about files you want to exculde the "churn" as you said it, go ahead and actually check how much space this actually takes up. Text and especially logs are highly compressible and will most likely end up taking up almost no space.

Be sure you backup everything you actually need, rather backup a file more then a file too less.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #137 for this comm, first seen 17th Oct 2026, 15:00] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I just rsync a full backup of my NAS's entire RAID array every week to a separate machine. I have Proxmox set up with an NFS mount to the NAS where it stores all of the /[userdata] volumes that my VMs and LXCs use; Proxmox itself is hosted on 3x office PCs, each with i7-7700/500GB SSD/32GB RAM, and set up for replication in case one goes down. On occasion I'll actually document which services I'm using, so I don't really bother backing those up since the volume(s) holding the userdata itself is backed up and can be easily remapped to a new instance of whatever service needs it.

Zero or one backups depending on the type of data generally.

For a system if it can't be redeployed from a list of requirements then I Foundationally ducked up. It means either I'm depending on something fragile, unknowable or over complicated.

Raw data on the other hand goes on a raid array. If I need more redundancy then that, then a single extra off site backup on a cd or something.

A back up on the same drive as the original isn't a backup. It's a waste of space, and a stupid idea.

A system that requires excessive nonsense is not reliable.

If I have a on and off site back up and both fail. Then either the world is literally fucking on fire and it doesn't matter. Or someone dropped a bomb on my storage.

Either way I have bigger problems at that point.