Projects I always have to many ongoing projects to make steady progress on any of them. I'm in the middle of setting up a backup server with a raspberry-pi with rsnapshot. My goal is a completely automatic, wife-friendly backup system. I'm 90% done; only a couple windows 10 kinks to sort out. I've also started working again on a dormant coding project I started to teach myself about machine learning. I've been interested in it ever since I read a Martin Gardner book in middle-school that had an explanation of a simple reinforcement-leaning idea. My purpose is to teach myself about ML, not solve a particular problem, so I am teaching as many ML algorithms as I can understand to play tic-tac-toe. And the third, and highest priority project I'm about to start is to sand, stain, finish, and re-cushion four discarded dining room chairs we found last week.
I feel you about that too many projects thing. I always think I'm picking the simplest possible thing and then I find out its way more work than it seemed get a little discouraged, jump to another, get excited for the first again rinse and repeat.
The amount of data I have that both changes frequently and is vital to have available right after a computer crash is less than a few gigs, All of that is in either dropbox or Google drive free storage, and the more sensitive stuff i keep in encrypted volumes in Dropbox. But the less important stuff i want backed up is >1tb, so I didn't want to pay for a cloud backup service since it would get expensive and I didn't think it was necessary. Rsnapshot is basically just some rotation scripts for rsync, so it has the bandwidth benefits of incremental backups, but saves me some backup management complexity. I also like the way rsnapshot stores the backup file tree: it used hard links for identical files, but it doesn't store differentials for changed files- it stores the whole file. This takes up a bit more space, but it again simplifies the admin: I simply share that backed up file tree read-only to the network, and authorized users can restore accidentally changed or deleted files without remote access to the server (wife-friendliness). So that's why I picked rsnapshot over rsync or rdiff-backup.
That sounds like you have the right choice of tool then haha, just remember to test your backups every so often; I'm guessing you're using an external hard drive with the pi -- noticed any problems from the USB and ethernet sharing a bus? I've seen that as the common reason to avoid using it as a torrent box or anything IO heavy.
It's kinda slow. But for me slow isn't the end of the world. If I fat-finger delete a vacation album, it will only take a few minutes to restore. If a laptop crashes and I have a few hundred GBs to restore, I'll just unplug the drive and transfer directly.