Some backup methods – like VM backups on a basic Proxmox VE – only support full backups, so they put a lot of stress on the system and take a lot of space. Even if the performance hit or service disruption during the backup is manageable, a homelabber has finite disk space for backups, so there’s a tradeoff between RPO (most recent backup) and retention (oldest backup). Keeping 2 weeks of backups is cheap for weekly, expensive daily.
Ideally, everything would be backed up incrementally at fairly short intervals (short RPO, long retention), and restorable very quickly (short RTO). Getting there is a journey and weekly automatic backups is a great step.
But maybe losing a week of data is fine in their case. There are parts of my lab that would even be fine with monthly backups…
Some backup methods – like VM backups on a basic Proxmox VE – only support full backups, so they put a lot of stress on the system and take a lot of space. Even if the performance hit or service disruption during the backup is manageable, a homelabber has finite disk space for backups, so there’s a tradeoff between RPO (most recent backup) and retention (oldest backup). Keeping 2 weeks of backups is cheap for weekly, expensive daily.
Ideally, everything would be backed up incrementally at fairly short intervals (short RPO, long retention), and restorable very quickly (short RTO). Getting there is a journey and weekly automatic backups is a great step.
But maybe losing a week of data is fine in their case. There are parts of my lab that would even be fine with monthly backups…