I use restic.

Borg has worked well for me. Also supports compression, encryption and deduplication.

Kopia

Bvckup (not a typo)

Made by a little Swiss company, extremely light but very competent. Stays completely out of your way unless it absolutely must get your attention (which is usually never).

I think it’s paid only but it’s very reasonable. Works great in intermittent situations, I. E. It won’t blow up if it tries to run a scheduled backup and the source or target is disconnected etc… Works very well for me for a decade.

I have a similar setup (external USB drive that I periodically plugin to backup stuff), and I use rsnapshot which is based on the venerable rsync utility. It is a command line solution that I’ve used for many years and it allows you to do daily, weekly, or even monthly backups.

I also use rsnapshot for handling remote backups as well, so it is pretty versatile.

FreeFileSync is FOSS and works pretty well for me. It can be set up for automated sync on a schedule or you can just manually sync files between two destinations. I haven’t really tinkered with the automated stuff but if what you want is to open up a program and hit a button to sync, it can definitely do that.

I’m also interested in this, I use Syncthing for multi-device sync, but it’s not aimed for multi-directoy in a single device backup

I am very happy using duply, that uses duplicity. Works well both for mounted disks or S3.

I would ignore any recommendations of a sync tool like Dropbox. They will very happy propagate your problem in all your places before you realized it.

I recently set up rsnapshot. You set the backup cadence as a cron job. And then every time it runs, it hard links all the files that haven’t changed, then rsyncs all the files that have changed. So you could go back to three days ago if you set it up that way. Or last month. Or whatever works for your use case.

The catch is that it has to pull the files rather than push, so if you have a Synology or something with a smaller OS, it may not support rsnapshot. For my Synology, I had to create a docker container for it to work, since there was no way to install it directly on the host OS.

Hey, I’d recommend taking a look at Syncthing. It’s software that runs locally, and you can configure the synchronisation to occur in a unidirectional flow instead of bidirectional. I.e. configure it to only synchronise data from the source drive to the backup drive.

Hope this helps and all the best!

EDIT: As pointed out, Syncthing is more suited to syncing data between two or more devices so may not be the right solution for OPs use case.

I’m using good old rsync in a command line

rclone with backblaze b2.Goodl luck finding a cheaper solution that’s actually durable.

Restic is my go-to.

Lot’s of recommendations here thank you everyone. Will take me a little bit of time to read through all the options here but there looks to be same great solutions.

Thank you very much.

Am I the only one here who uses backintime? It is easy to use and supports incremental backups.