For years the core of my backup strategy has been rsnapshot via cryptshot to various external drives for local backups, and Tarsnap for remote backups.

Tarsnap, however, can be slow. It tends to take somewhere between 15 to 20 minutes to create my dozen or so archives, even if little has changed since the last run. My impression is that this is simply due to the number of archives I have stored and the number of files I ask it to archive. Once it has decided what to do, the time spent transferring data is negligible. I run Tarsnap hourly. Twenty minutes out of every hour seems like a lot of time spent Tarsnapping.

Initially I played with borgmatic to perform and maintain the backups. Unfortunately it seems to have issues with signal handling, which caused me to end up with annoying lock files left over from interrupted backups. Borg itself has good documentation and is easy to use, and I think it is useful to build familiarity with the program itself instead of only interacting with it through something else. So I did away with borgmatic and wrote a small bash script to handle my use case.

Creating the backups is simple enough. Borg disables compression by default, but after a little experimentation I found that LZ4 seemed to be a decent compromise between compression and performance.

Pruning backups is equally easy. I knew I wanted to match roughly what I had with Tarsnap: hourly backups for a day or so, daily backups for a week or so, then a month or two of weekly backups, and finally a year or so of monthly backups.