Ultimately, I landed on a combination of BorgBackup, Rclone, and Wasabi cloud storage, and I couldn't be happier with my decision. Borg fits all my criteria and has a pretty healthy community of users and contributors. It offers deduplication and compression, and works great on PC, Mac, and Linux. I use Rclone to synchronize the backup repositories from the Borg host to S3-compatible storage on Wasabi. Any S3-compatible storage will work, but I chose Wasabi because its price can't be beat and it outperforms Amazon's S3. With this setup, I can restore files from the local Borg host or from Wasabi. //
Each machine has a backup.sh script (see below) that is kicked off by cron at regular intervals; it will make only one backup set per day, but it doesn't hurt to try a few times in the same day. The laptops are set to try every two hours, because there's no guarantee they will be on at a certain time, but it's very likely they'll be on during one of those times. //
I could skip the cron job and provide a relatively easy way for each user to trigger a backup using BorgWeb, but I really don't want anyone to have to remember to back things up. I tend to forget to click that backup button until I'm in dire need of a restoration (at which point it's way too late!).
The backup script I'm using came from the Borg quick start docs, plus I added a little check at the top to see if Borg is already running, which will exit the script if the previous backup run is still in progress. //
Restoring files is not as easy as it was with CrashPlan, but it is relatively straightforward. The fastest approach is to restore from the backup stored on the Borg backup server. Here are some example commands used to restore:
