A boring, reliable backup routine

October 2026

The best backup setup is the one that runs without you thinking about it. Mine is a nightly restic job to an external disk plus a weekly copy offsite.

restic -r /mnt/backup backup ~/documents ~/photos --exclude-caches

Test the restore

Once a month I restore a random folder into a temp directory and compare checksums. It takes five minutes and has caught two broken setups so far.