A small backup script that actually gets run
April 20, 2026
I had three backup setups over the years. All of them were well thought out, and none of them ran after the first month, because each one needed me to do something.
The current one is forty lines of shell, a systemd timer and restic. It runs every night, prunes old snapshots and sends one line to a log I actually read.
[Timer] OnCalendar=*-*-* 03:30 RandomizedDelaySec=20m Persistent=true
Persistent=true is the important part: if the machine was off at 03:30, the job runs at the next boot. The other important part is a monthly restore test. A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a backup.