Charles Curley writes:
On Sat, 02 Nov 2019 20:24:52 +0100 Konstantin Nebel <konne...@gmx.de> wrote:
[...]
> So now I am thinking. How should I approach backups. On windows it > does magically backups and remind me when they didnt run for a while. > I like that attitude. > > On linux with all that decision freedom it can be good and bad cause > you have to think about things :D I started writing a reply to this several days ago, and realized it would make a good blog entry. I'd appreciate feedback. https://charlescurley.com/blog/posts/2019/Nov/02/backups-on-linux/index.html
[...] Thanks for sharing! I appreciate that I am not the only one with a backup system composed of multiple tools with different timings and occasions of invocation :) One point where my opinion is slightly different (might boil down to taste, but that's part of the feedback?). Quoting from the blog:
Some stuff isn't worth the disk space to back up because you can regenerate it or re-install it just as easily. Caches, such as a web proxy's. Executables you can re-install, like your office suite.
I personally think it is (especially today) not so easy to keep track of all the programs one actually needs and where to get them. Additionally, one should take into consideration, whether the avaiability of Internet access (needed for software re-installation unless other measures are taken) is really part of the assumptions for backup restoring? I try to put some effort into 100%-offline-restoration. At the same time, I try to avoid "disk image"-style backups, because they are hard to make (usually the system needs to be offline for this) and they are hard to restore: What if my server with 4x2T HDDs just dies. By tomorrow, I will not have another server, a humble laptop with 500 GB HDD might be all there is for the moment. Restoring images is infeasible in that situation, a normal "reinstallation" is less (but might be: consider borrowing a computer frome someone else for some time. In that case it will likely be impossible to change the OS and thus the software installation might be limited...) YMMV Linux-Fan