I was wondering how often does one choose to make and keep back ups. I know that “It depends on your business needs”, but that is rather vague and unsatisfying, so I was hoping to hear some heuristics from the community. Like say I had a workstation/desktop that is acting as a server at a shop (taking inventory / sales receipts) and would be using something like timeshift to keep snapshots. I feel like keeping two daily and a weekly would be alright for a store, since the two most recent would not be too old or something. I also feel like using the hourly snapshots would be too taxing on a CPU and might be using to much disk space.
As others have said, with an incremental filesystem level mechanism, the backup process won’t be too taxing for the CPU. I have ZFS set up which makes this easy and I make hourly snapshots using sanoid which also get sent to another mirrored pair of connected drives using syncoid. Then, once a day, I upload encrypted daily snapshots to a bucket in the cloud using restic. Sounds complicated, but actually sanoid/syncoid and restic do all the heavy lifting. All I did is automate their schedules using systemd timers and some scripts to backup the right directories.
How do you upload a snapshot? I’m using TrueNAS where I can make snapshots visible in a otherwise hidden .zfs directory. Do you just backup from there or something similar? Is there an upside to backing up a snapshot instead of just the current data?