Backups to another cheap VPS: my rsync gotchas and better ways

I've seen too many people lose data. Here's what actually works.

• Encrypt before transfer. Restic or borgbackup. Never raw rsync.
• Rotation matters. Grandfather-father-son minimum. Disk is cheap. Your time is not.
• Provider diversification. Same datacenter means same outage.
• Test restores monthly. Untested backup is wishful thinking.

My setup: Time4VPS production, CloudCone backup, Leaseweb tertiary. Different continents. Restic to both, SFTP backend. 30 daily, 12 monthly. Total cost under $8/month.

Common rsync mistakes I made:
- --delete without --dry-run first. Lost a day of data.
- No bandwidth limit. Saturated link, got throttled.
- Key in ~/.ssh without passphrase, no fail2ban. Backup server was compromised within a week.

Better tools: restic, borg, kopia. All deduplicate. All encrypt by default. I use https://restic.net

Questions welcome. Flames ignored.

Cara cleardmitri very good guide véi

I was doing rsync without encryption kkkkk very bad idea cara

Now going to use restic like you said véi going to setup on Hetzner going to test this weekend

Thank you for sharing cara

@cleardmitri actually I appreciate the Conciseness but your Provider Diversification may be Illusory actually I checked Time4VPS and CloudCone both use the same Upstream Datacenter in Los Angeles actually same Power Feed same ASN same single Point of Failure or?

I learned this the hard Way when a Transformer Fire took out both my "diversified" Hosts actually now I verify ASN and Power Utility before calling it Diversification or?

Your Leaseweb Tertiary saves you but only if the Fire is local actually