Right now I’m creating a nightly restic snapshot of my server on borgbase and on some spare drives, and keeping the snapshots forever. There’s a ton of daily churn in my data though, between databases and logs and other files that don’t constitute ‘real data’ but might be needed to restore the app.
Kinda depends on what it’s for. My server? IDK, 2 days. Maybe have a dedicated weekly/monthly backup left behind. PC? Honestly just the latest is fine.
But it’s a 10tb drive, so I’ve got months of backups even if they’re running continuously. It’s less a how comfortable I am and more a how much can I afford. (a lot more before the shortage)
I also explicitly purge stuff that’s constantly changing like logs. I don’t care for logs in my backups. Only on the live machine.
I have about 750GB of irreplaceable files on my server so I want a really solid history. A couple of days backup is no where near enough to give me peace of mind 😅
3 2 1 offsite backups typically happen a lot less often than local copies or local backups.
I also don’t really consider any machines data to be irreplaceable. If I lose my phone I want the latest backup. But taxes or photos I care for? Those are an entirely different backup, and those aren’t incremental. They’re just what they are.