I am currently using Duplicacy which works quite well. However, there are some features that I would like to see that it does not have, such as mount snapshots in file explorer and manually delete snapshots you don't want to keep as the storage is filling up quite a bit.

I have seen Kopia which looks interesting and is starred on FMHY.

But then there is Borg, which doesn't work on Windows, but there are plenty of 3rd party tools and such that do support or use Borg. Such as Vorta and Borgmatic which looks interesting and cool.

It does make me wonder how each of these compare which each other, such as backing up to a cloud provider or offsite. Best compression ect. I would only do local only backups and then just move the backup drives between places, so I do have an offsite backup. But also Duplicacy is using up a lot of storage and I can't say delete previous snapshots from the webui (yet).

So what are people using for backing up and why. What have been people's experiences comparing them, and if anyone has switched between one and another as well, what did they do with previous backups?

What kind of backup?

Macrium for Windows, time machine for Mac. Duplicati for server shares. User scripts/rsync for full unraid backup to a second unraid server.

Off-site is a work in progress but right now is just raw files to an external HDD, critical data files only.

I also have urbackup but am about to ditch it, it just freezes when I try to actually work with backups. Backups you can't access are worthless...

My post may or may not provide the exact answers you're looking for but hopefully it will provide some insight.

I use Vorta which is a GUI for Borg. I chose this because I have a Linux friend who really liked Borg and he used it at work to back up their sensitive data. I use Vorta instead of Borg directly because I no longer use console apps, a well-built GUI is easier to understand. That being said, Vorta is a bit kudgy but it allows you to specify multiple source locations and a target location that can be local or remote. It uses deduplication and compression which both cut down on the size of the backup. It also uses encryption for the target location and it supports pruning which allows it to keep a certain number of older snapshots. However, keep in mind that deleted files remain until they are pruned. That means that if your pruning is set for 10 years then a deleted file will stay around for 10 years. I'm using an older Vorta docker template but the new one has a RESTORE option which allows you to mount an older snapshot so that you can restore files from that.

Each backup/snapshot only keeps a note of what changed from the previous snapshot. Vorta runs each day for me (daily backup) so if nothing changes then nothing is added to the archive. If a file moves around within the source directory of the archive (moves around within the archive) then it's old and new locations are noted but no additional space is taken up. If a file is deleted it stays until it's pruned.

I have different docker containers/archives for different types of files (documents, pictures, music, videos, etc.) because smaller, bite-size containers are easier to manage than one massive container (I have 20TB of data being backed up in 7 containers/archives). Note that moving files around in such a way that they move from one container/archive to another defeats the purpose of the deduplication since the file moving from one container is deleted from there (and will remain there until pruned) and that file will now appear in the new container thereby taking up space in both containers.

Let me know if you have a specific question.

I use urBackup for all my systems. It supports both windows and linux, both image and file based backups, and both local network and remote backups. One nice thing is that it is centrally managed meaning you can configure the settings for all the clients and trigger backups from the server interface. It supports deduplicated backups on a number of different storage types. It offers synthetic full backup types, where any backup can be deleted without effecting the others. There is a docker container for both the server and client.

On 12/27/2025 at 4:48 PM, primeval_god said:

I use urBackup for all my systems. It supports both windows and linux, both image and file based backups, and both local network and remote backups. One nice thing is that it is centrally managed meaning you can configure the settings for all the clients and trigger backups from the server interface. It supports deduplicated backups on a number of different storage types. It offers synthetic full backup types, where any backup can be deleted without effecting the others. There is a docker container for both the server and client.

Hello,

I'm trying several backup solutions, at the moment I'm on "UrBackup" and is quite interesting. I'm wondering what could be the best solution for offsite backup of "UrBackup". I have a old QNAP NAS that I like to use for 2nd backup. Maybe 1st backup with "UrBackup" (Unraid-SRV) and 2nd backup with "luckyBackup" to QNAP NAS (entire UrBackup folder) ? How do you manage this?

Thanks!

You can run Urbackup server and client on both Unraid and QNAP

On 1/5/2026 at 3:51 PM, Michael_P said:

You can run Urbackup server and client on both Unraid and QNAP

Yes, but Urbackup supports only 1 backup destination

1 hour ago, Neo78 said:

Yes, but Urbackup supports only 1 backup destination

Haven't tried it, but clients can backup to two different servers provided the keys match

Here's the relavent bit from the manual in 4.3:

If you want to have several servers to be able to do backups of a client you have two options. Either you manually supply the server credentials to the client (by copying them into ’server_idents.txt’) or you give all servers the same credentials by copying the same ’server_ident.key’, ’server_ident_ecdsa409k1.p riv’ and ’server_ident_ecdsa409k1.pub’ to all servers

A quick AI generated instruction later and we have this:

Install UrBackup on the second server.
Copy Security Files: From the first server, copy server_idents.txt, server_ident_ecdsa409k1.key, etc., to the second server's data directory (usually /var/urbackup/).
Configure Clients: Add the second server's identity string to the first server's server_idents.txt file (or add the first server's to the second's), or add both server identities to your client configurations.
Start Services: Restart UrBackup services on all servers/clients.
Result: Clients will now find and back up to both servers, creating identical backups on each. 

YMMV

I didn't want to backup onto external hard drives or build another server so I got a LTO8 tape drive. I installed this using an external sas card in a Rocky VM.

I have each individual disk mounted in my VM. The largest disks in my unraid server are 8 TB.

LTO8 drives support formatting LTO7 tapes as Type M which have a formatted size of 9 TB. LTO7 tapes can be purchased for about $30 each.

I simply use tar to backup each individual disk to a single tape. Tar supports incremental backups so I can come back several months later and add to each tape as needed.

The tape drive is the expensive part of my backup strategy but once you have one, backups of a large amount of data is dirt cheap and very reliable.