I’ve been meaning to back up my digital life properly for ages. I finally got around to it and I’m really happy with the result.

Step one, I ordered an external hard drive and use Apple’s Time Machine software to back up the entire disk. I just plug it in once a month and come back an hour later.

Step two, I’ve set up a restic repository running on rsync.net. rsync.net has a special no-support plan for “technically proficient” people. I pay $33.60 USD per year for 200GB of storage. The data lives in Switzerland and is replicated once, somewhere else in the world.

The restic repository works with just two commands. One to create the repo:

restic -r sftp:your-domain.rsync.net:repo init

and one to back up to the repo, which I run by hand every so often:

restic -r sftp:your-domain.rsync.net:repo backup folders/ to/ backup/

This works really well! I have confidence that I will not lose the data I care about. It stores historical snapshots. It was easy to set up and use. Success!