If you don’t have the budget for on-premises backup, you almost certainly can’t afford to restore the cloud backup if anything goes wrong.

I believe egress is free on Backblaze B2.

Just make sure to test the restore procedure once in a while.

Good call on this. Curious if you have a procedure for actually doing this. I could just wipe out my system and rebuild it from the backup, but then I’m in trouble if it fails. What does a proper test of a backup actually look like?

Check out Borgbase, it’s very cheap and it’s an actual backup solution, so it offers some features you won’t get from Google drive or whatever you were considering using e.g. deduplication, recover data at different points in time and have the data be encrypted so there’s no way for them to access it.

I looked at Borgbase, but I think it will be a bit more pricey than Restic + Backblaze B2. Looks like Borgbase is $80/year for 1TB, which would be $72/year on B2 and less if I don’t use all of 1TB.

The vast majority of your system is the same as it would be if you install fresh, so you’re wasting backup space in storing data you can easily recover in other ways.

I get this, but it would be faster to restore, right? And the storage I’m going to use to store these files is relatively little compared to the overall volume of data I’m backing up. For example, I’m backing up 100GB of personal photos and home movies. Backing up the system, even though strictly not necessary, will be something like 5% of this, I think, and I’d lean toward paying another few cents every month for a faster restore.

Thanks for your thoughts on the database backups. It’s a helpful perspective!

Had considered a device with some storage at a family member’s house, but then I’d have to maintain that, fix it if it goes down, replace it if it breaks, etc. I think I’d prefer a small monthly fee for now, even if it may work out more expensive in the long run.

Good call on the cost calculation. I’ll take another look at those factors…

If that’s the main downside to a full-system backup, I might go ahead and try it. I’ll check out Backrest too. Looks great!

Much easier than what I was trying to do. Thank you!

You’re right, but part of the draw of Linux is that you have more control over your OS. An immutable distro makes that a lot harder to get at as compared to non-immutable.

I feel it’s important to note for new people that, while an immutable OS is great at keeping you from breaking your system, the way it achieves this can make some things you would want to do more difficult. In Bazzite, installing software, for example, works differently than under a typical distribution.

I’ll give the example of two pieces of software that I use regularly: 1Password and Espanso. It took a fair bit of digging to figure out how to install 1Password in a way that would preserve its tight system integration… and it still doesn’t quite work — copying a password in particular contexts just doesn’t put that password on the clipboard, while it works fine in other contexts. Espanso on the other hand just won’t work under Bazzite best I can tell. I haven’t found a way to install it at all so I’m just doing without. Oh My ZSH was also quite tricky, and I got yelled at in the Bazzite Discord for doing it the wrong way. 😅

Plenty of the software I use works fine and was easy to install: FreeTube, Kdenlive, VLC, Zen Browser… unless you count the fact that the 1Password browser integration just won’t work with Zen Browser, presumably because I haven’t found the exact right combination of Flatpak permissions plus settings that will allow it to.

All this to say, I love Bazzite for gaming and use it every day, but the moment you step outside that world and want your computer to do something a little bit differently, it’s a major headache. In the context of gaming, it’s much closer to “just works” than any other distro I’ve tried.