Re: timeshift

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Mon, Aug 9, 2021 at 2:48 PM ~Stack~  wrote:
>
> On 8/9/21 10:48 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
> > She wants an incremental backup system that uses a removable external
> > drive, and that she can initiate (not time interval daemon driven), and
> > that allows her to "find" a deleted file that she needs -- but for which
> > she looks both by the file name, but also by scanning content when
> > necessary (including viewing an image file such as JPEG or a video file
> > such as MP4).
>
> Rsnapshot allows for you to run manually whenever you want.
>
> As for finding files, it is just any utility you want to use to look at
> the filesystem.

One of my favorites was to swap the drives out for somewhere offsite
and enable Kerberos based NFS4, rsync over SSH, or raw rsync for
access to different backups with distinct privileges as needed, It
made "Let me get a copy of my home directory from last month" much,
much easier.

Re: Back UP

[Paul Robert Marino]

well if cron is broken you could take the sedghamer approach and
install jobscheduler
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.sos-2Dberlin.com_en_jobscheduler-2Ddownloads=DwIFaQ=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=zg66EiCB-0MjyUT4sH_xbY9luy7GY2Jvc8OmDcWBFEo=U3ysnINxB8VXojeYx_Aq6wQBgErIZ9p5zO8T6la0m_8=
  lol
seriously though its a bit much if you are just replacing cron but if
you are enterprise scale automation its awesome.

On Mon, Aug 9, 2021 at 5:29 PM Jon Pruente  wrote:
>
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 9, 2021 at 3:36 PM Larry Linder 
> <0dea520dd180-dmarc-requ...@listserv.fnal.gov> wrote:
>>
>> Have friends and relatives buy a MAC.
>
>
> I know this is a silly nit to pick in what you are posting about, but it 
> reminded me that I tend to see it most often from technical types. Why do 
> people use MAC when referring to a Macintosh? MAC should be for something 
> like a MAC address. We don't call people named Joseph JOE when their name 
> gets shortened. However, technical types seem to do it all the time for Macs. 
> Just a habit from dealing with MAC addresses all the time?

Re: Back UP

[Jon Pruente]

On Mon, Aug 9, 2021 at 3:36 PM Larry Linder <
0dea520dd180-dmarc-requ...@listserv.fnal.gov> wrote:

> Have friends and relatives buy a MAC.
>

I know this is a silly nit to pick in what you are posting about, but it
reminded me that I tend to see it most often from technical types. Why do
people use MAC when referring to a Macintosh? MAC should be for something
like a MAC address. We don't call people named Joseph JOE when their name
gets shortened. However, technical types seem to do it all the time for
Macs. Just a habit from dealing with MAC addresses all the time?

Re: Back UP

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Mon, Aug 9, 2021 at 4:36 PM Larry Linder
<0dea520dd180-dmarc-requ...@listserv.fnal.gov> wrote:
>
> Cron is now broken so you can't scehedule reliable backups.
>
> This got broken in SL 6.9 worked in SL 6.5.
> The reason is that it is looking for files from yum.  Whot does yum have
> to do with cron I heav yet to figure it out.

Since you've not published any error messages, no one can reasonably
save you. RHEL 6 and SL 6 are no longer supported, except that you can
pay for "RHEL 6 ELS", or extended life support. Time to update.

> Disk like - we date code our disks and when they are over 5000 hr.  We
> swap them out and give toss them.  We have had replaced a bunch of disk
> at one time and 3 years later they all died within a month.  They are
> typically on 24 / 7.  We stagger the start up dates by 6 mo.

That... wounds ike the old IBM "Deskstar" problem, known as the "IBM
Deathstar" issue, where thousands of consumer grade disks failed after
a specific amount of wear and took out cheap RAID clusters around the
world. But staggered over six months that sounds like you had a
cooling problem in your racks.

Don't blame your hardware failures on SL or RHEL, unless they were
doing something really stupid like nightly filling all your disks with
zeroes to "optimeze" themselves, which is not a default behavior.

> My advise if you don't want to be forever the support team - buy a MAC.

Apple provides no server support. Zero, zip, nada, end of sentence.
They support only consumer devices, and those are quite expensive.
Don't conflate drive failures with distribution issues, and if you
want OS commercial support, guess what? Get some RHEL licenses,
because that kind of work costs money.

> The people I have helped get on to a Linux system are not OS smart and I
> spend a lot of time helping them out.  It also looks like it may be a
> cradel to grave problem.

You were upset, so I'll not comment on your spelling errors except to
say maybe you could have used a break before writing this note?

> I money is problem there are a lot free Gov. computers available.  They
> are not free its just that you and I have to pay for them with our
> taxes.

Well yes. Supporting critical, complex, or consumer abused systems
is something people get paid for.

> I set my wife up with a Linux box and support is seconds away 24/7.  She
> is smart & industrious and just uses mail, OpenOffice, and a photo
> archive for the grand kids pictures.  That is if I expect dinner on
> time.
> Have friends and relatives buy a MAC.
> Then you can plead - ignorance.

If you've the spare $1000 to buy a Mac of equivalent power, especially
including those very expensive replacements, and don't need
server-grade dual power supplies, hot-swap hard drives, high density
blade installations, or support for commercial grade mail servers or
AutoCAD.

Deliberately pleading ignorance to avoid helping your wife does not
sound like a positive relationship, though I've heard of other people
pulling this stunt.

> Regards
> Larry Linder

Back UP

[Larry Linder]

Cron is now broken so you can't scehedule reliable backups.

This got broken in SL 6.9 worked in SL 6.5.
The reason is that it is looking for files from yum.  Whot does yum have
to do with cron I heav yet to figure it out.

Disk like - we date code our disks and when they are over 5000 hr.  We
swap them out and give toss them.  We have had replaced a bunch of disk
at one time and 3 years later they all died within a month.  They are
typically on 24 / 7.  We stagger the start up dates by 6 mo.

My advise if you don't want to be forever the support team - buy a MAC.

The people I have helped get on to a Linux system are not OS smart and I
spend a lot of time helping them out.  It also looks like it may be a
cradel to grave problem.

I money is problem there are a lot free Gov. computers available.  They
are not free its just that you and I have to pay for them with our
taxes.

I set my wife up with a Linux box and support is seconds away 24/7.  She
is smart & industrious and just uses mail, OpenOffice, and a photo
archive for the grand kids pictures.  That is if I expect dinner on
time.
Have friends and relatives buy a MAC.
Then you can plead - ignorance.

Regards
Larry Linder

Re: timeshift

[~Stack~]

On 8/9/21 10:48 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
She wants an incremental backup system that uses a removable external 
drive, and that she can initiate (not time interval daemon driven), and 
that allows her to "find" a deleted file that she needs -- but for which 
she looks both by the file name, but also by scanning content when 
necessary (including viewing an image file such as JPEG or a video file 
such as MP4).


Rsnapshot allows for you to run manually whenever you want.

As for finding files, it is just any utility you want to use to look at 
the filesystem.


~Stack~

Re: timeshift

[Yasha Karant]

I have added one previous response to this subject below that from Stack.

The multiple back-up, remote site, and redundant fail-over described 
below is of course very desirable and totally infeasible for the 
end-user situation.  As for backing up to the cloud, the user has a USA 
DSL connection to the web, with an internal (inside the house) an IEEE 
802.11 network for which the combination DSL access "router" is under 
the configuration control of the ISP (in this region for DSL over a USA 
voice telephone provider copper twisted pair connection for the "last 
mile" from Frontier Communications as the provider -- for those outside 
the USA, the communications networks are, as with the USA for-profit 
health care system, both much more expensive and much less capable than 
what many of those on this list are familiar.  Thus, remote backup is 
not a viable alternative (particularly given Internet service 
interruptions and degradations from the provider, allowed by the USA 
for-profit "regulations", even when the lower layer DSL is "active").


The end user in question uses "cook book" vocational training IT type 
books to use the office suite applications she wants (e.g., MS Office XP 
now being forced to upgrade to MS Office 2007, currently running under 
CrossOver -- commercially supported Wine), does not want to learn 
LibreOffice and until LibreOffice is fully compatible with all MS Office 
formats, cannot use these for her professional applications (for which 
MS Office formats are the "standard" along with PDF -- LaTeX is not 
used).  If I am to "support" her needs, I insist that her machines are 
"unix" -- today, Linux.


She wants an incremental backup system that uses a removable external 
drive, and that she can initiate (not time interval daemon driven), and 
that allows her to "find" a deleted file that she needs -- but for which 
she looks both by the file name, but also by scanning content when 
necessary (including viewing an image file such as JPEG or a video file 
such as MP4).


As for "attitude changes", I expect none.  In large measure this is 
because "computer 'education'" typically is vocational "secretarial" 
studies to use a few end user IT applications, and with no explanation 
or understanding of how a modern classical computer "works" (classical, 
not quantum, neurosynaptic, etc.).  In the USA, a major issue is the 
lack of education in mathematics -- USA "high school algebra" already is 
being phased out for a general 4 year university degree at many USA 
accredited "colleges and universities".  Without mathematics, very 
little understanding of computers is possible (both for the software and 
the hardware).


Déjà Dup may be a viable solution -- I will look at that.

On 8/9/21 7:17 AM, ~Stack~ wrote:

On 8/9/21 1:47 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:

"rsnapshot". Old, stable, and extremely effective at configuring backs
of both system files and user data.


I second rsnapshot. Been using it for years and it is easy to set up 
Yearly/Monthly/Daily/Hourly backups and how many of each you want to 
keep. Since it uses symlinks, only the data changed takes up space.


Since I'm backing up a LOT of systems, I've got a dedicated server. But 
I've used it before on just a single laptop with an external drive.


The two cautions I'll give are:
* Have an off-site backup too. I have two external drives that I rotate 
weekly to a secure location (it can be your house) that just has the 
most current backup. The way I do it, if I lose /everything/ else then 
worst case scenario I still have my data as of two weeks ago. I have 
lived through a catastrophic failure and I did so with very little data 
loss.


* Backups can be very challenging. The more options you want and the 
more devices and the more OS's and the more things you want to tweak 
just make backup that much more complex. Pretty soon you find the only 
thing that matches your requirements are enterprise solutions like 
Bacula. Rsnapshot is simple and has several things you can tweak, but 
don't expect a lot of bells and whistles other then the basics. I've 
found that's true of most of the simple backup interfaces.


Good luck!
~Stack~



Benson Muite  wrote:

Déjà Dup is a good choice for that.  However, attitude changes may 
also be required. Assuming that some of the information is confidential 
time investment on the part of the user in understanding and being able 
to configure the system may be useful in the long run. If you manage to 
create an attitude change, please let us know how so we can replicate 
the process:)

Re: timeshift

[Bruce Nichol]

I schedule a daily Borgmatic 
 / BorgBacku
p locally and remote to
BorgBase 
.  Works like a charm.  Data recovery
could be a challenge for her.

On Mon, Aug 9, 2021 at 3:04 AM Benson Muite 
wrote:

> Déjà Dup is a good choice for that.
>
> However, attitude changes may also be required. Assuming that some of
> the information is confidential time investment on the part of the user
> in understanding and being able to configure the system may be useful in
> the long run. If you manage to create an attitude change, please let us
> know how so we can replicate the process:)
>
> On 8/9/21 9:49 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
> > Thank you for the suggestion.  However, I am NOT going to run the end
> > user machine -- I have too many other things to do to be full time
> > technical support (an IT technician, albeit one who uses Linux, not MS
> > Windows or MacOS X, etc).  She wants an incremental backup without file
> > duplication and with the ability to "read" files from the backup without
> > actually restoring these to the machine storage unless she so chooses
> > (eg, the ability to recover a file she deleted but now needs). Moreover,
> > the backup unit (probably a 1 Tbyte external USB drive the size of a
> > deck of playing cards or perhaps smaller) needs to be removable from the
> > machine.  She plans to plug in the drive, Linux automounts it, and then
> > she starts the incremental backup application of her (not the "system")
> > files, typically her home directory and the tree from there, including
> > links to her own files (not system files). When done, she safely removes
> > the USB drive until the next backup.  Unless I were to write (or find) a
> > tar script and produce a GUI front end (she does not like to use a
> > terminal application but rather a GUI -- she uses a word processor, etc,
> > but not vi, not even GUI gvim), tar would not be a useful solution.  (I
> > did use tar to move her files from her "old" laptop to her "new" one,
> > using an external USB drive, but she does not know nor is willing to
> > understand how to do this.)
> >
> > Timeshift does appear to be a system backup -- this is not what she
> wants.
> >
> > Regards
> >
> > Yasha
> >
> > On 8/8/21 10:19 PM, Andrew Komornicki wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> Have you considered just doing a tar on the /home directory on a
> >> periodic basis, and just copy the tar file to a backup drive. Simple and
> >> easy.
> >>
> >> regards,
> >> Andrew
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On 8/8/2021 7:38 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
> >>> Apple products and the Apple OS (currently based upon BSD) are
> >>> proprietary.� If one needs service (hardware or software), one
> >>> effectively must use an Apple store (at least in the USA).� The
> >>> colleague is retired and has little money (this is the downward mobile
> >>> USA economy save for the neo-liberal profiteers).� She got a
> >>> used/refurb
> >>> Lenovo Carbon X1 and I just installed a working Linux on it --
> >>> everything worked "out of the box".
> >>>
> >>> Reading more, Timeshift appears to be a systems, not end user files,
> >>> backup utility.� Any suggestions from anyone?
> >>>
> >>> Take care.� Stay safe.
> >>>
> >>> On 8/8/21 7:32 PM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
>  On Sun, Aug 08, 2021 at 04:09:04PM -0700, Yasha Karant wrote:
> >
> > Assuming that she obtains a, say 1 Tbyte, external USB drive
> > (powered from the USB port and either mechanical or SSD), she plans
> > to do incremental backups to the backup drive.
> >
> > ... what ... would anyone recommend?
> > ... [need] tool [that] actually "works".
> >
> 
>  get a mac and use the built-in incremental backup tool called "time
>  machine".
> 
>  spend more $$$, save on time, headache medicines and torn hair repair
>  (assuming you still had any).
> 
>

Re: timeshift

[Benson Muite]

Déjà Dup is a good choice for that.

However, attitude changes may also be required. Assuming that some of 
the information is confidential time investment on the part of the user 
in understanding and being able to configure the system may be useful in 
the long run. If you manage to create an attitude change, please let us 
know how so we can replicate the process:)


On 8/9/21 9:49 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
Thank you for the suggestion.  However, I am NOT going to run the end 
user machine -- I have too many other things to do to be full time 
technical support (an IT technician, albeit one who uses Linux, not MS 
Windows or MacOS X, etc).  She wants an incremental backup without file 
duplication and with the ability to "read" files from the backup without 
actually restoring these to the machine storage unless she so chooses 
(eg, the ability to recover a file she deleted but now needs). Moreover, 
the backup unit (probably a 1 Tbyte external USB drive the size of a 
deck of playing cards or perhaps smaller) needs to be removable from the 
machine.  She plans to plug in the drive, Linux automounts it, and then 
she starts the incremental backup application of her (not the "system") 
files, typically her home directory and the tree from there, including 
links to her own files (not system files). When done, she safely removes 
the USB drive until the next backup.  Unless I were to write (or find) a 
tar script and produce a GUI front end (she does not like to use a 
terminal application but rather a GUI -- she uses a word processor, etc, 
but not vi, not even GUI gvim), tar would not be a useful solution.  (I 
did use tar to move her files from her "old" laptop to her "new" one, 
using an external USB drive, but she does not know nor is willing to 
understand how to do this.)


Timeshift does appear to be a system backup -- this is not what she wants.

Regards

Yasha

On 8/8/21 10:19 PM, Andrew Komornicki wrote:


Hi,

Have you considered just doing a tar on the /home directory on a
periodic basis, and just copy the tar file to a backup drive. Simple and
easy.

regards,
Andrew



On 8/8/2021 7:38 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:

Apple products and the Apple OS (currently based upon BSD) are
proprietary.� If one needs service (hardware or software), one
effectively must use an Apple store (at least in the USA).� The
colleague is retired and has little money (this is the downward mobile
USA economy save for the neo-liberal profiteers).� She got a 
used/refurb

Lenovo Carbon X1 and I just installed a working Linux on it --
everything worked "out of the box".

Reading more, Timeshift appears to be a systems, not end user files,
backup utility.� Any suggestions from anyone?

Take care.� Stay safe.

On 8/8/21 7:32 PM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:

On Sun, Aug 08, 2021 at 04:09:04PM -0700, Yasha Karant wrote:


Assuming that she obtains a, say 1 Tbyte, external USB drive
(powered from the USB port and either mechanical or SSD), she plans
to do incremental backups to the backup drive.

... what ... would anyone recommend?
... [need] tool [that] actually "works".



get a mac and use the built-in incremental backup tool called "time
machine".

spend more $$$, save on time, headache medicines and torn hair repair
(assuming you still had any).

Re: timeshift

[Yasha Karant]

Thank you for the suggestion.  However, I am NOT going to run the end 
user machine -- I have too many other things to do to be full time 
technical support (an IT technician, albeit one who uses Linux, not MS 
Windows or MacOS X, etc).  She wants an incremental backup without file 
duplication and with the ability to "read" files from the backup without 
actually restoring these to the machine storage unless she so chooses 
(eg, the ability to recover a file she deleted but now needs). 
Moreover, the backup unit (probably a 1 Tbyte external USB drive the 
size of a deck of playing cards or perhaps smaller) needs to be 
removable from the machine.  She plans to plug in the drive, Linux 
automounts it, and then she starts the incremental backup application of 
her (not the "system") files, typically her home directory and the tree 
from there, including links to her own files (not system files). When 
done, she safely removes the USB drive until the next backup.  Unless I 
were to write (or find) a tar script and produce a GUI front end (she 
does not like to use a terminal application but rather a GUI -- she uses 
a word processor, etc, but not vi, not even GUI gvim), tar would not be 
a useful solution.  (I did use tar to move her files from her "old" 
laptop to her "new" one, using an external USB drive, but she does not 
know nor is willing to understand how to do this.)


Timeshift does appear to be a system backup -- this is not what she wants.

Regards

Yasha

On 8/8/21 10:19 PM, Andrew Komornicki wrote:


Hi,

Have you considered just doing a tar on the /home directory on a
periodic basis, and just copy the tar file to a backup drive. Simple and
easy.

regards,
Andrew



On 8/8/2021 7:38 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:

Apple products and the Apple OS (currently based upon BSD) are
proprietary.� If one needs service (hardware or software), one
effectively must use an Apple store (at least in the USA).� The
colleague is retired and has little money (this is the downward mobile
USA economy save for the neo-liberal profiteers).� She got a used/refurb
Lenovo Carbon X1 and I just installed a working Linux on it --
everything worked "out of the box".

Reading more, Timeshift appears to be a systems, not end user files,
backup utility.� Any suggestions from anyone?

Take care.� Stay safe.

On 8/8/21 7:32 PM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:

On Sun, Aug 08, 2021 at 04:09:04PM -0700, Yasha Karant wrote:


Assuming that she obtains a, say 1 Tbyte, external USB drive
(powered from the USB port and either mechanical or SSD), she plans
to do incremental backups to the backup drive.

... what ... would anyone recommend?
... [need] tool [that] actually "works".



get a mac and use the built-in incremental backup tool called "time
machine".

spend more $$$, save on time, headache medicines and torn hair repair
(assuming you still had any).

Re: timeshift

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Mon, Aug 9, 2021 at 1:19 AM Andrew Komornicki  wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Have you considered just doing a tar on the /home directory on a
> periodic basis, and just copy the tar file to a backup drive. Simple and
> easy.
>
> regards,
> Andrew

"rsnapshot". Old, stable, and extremely effective at configuring backs
of both system files and user data. Properly configured, with the
right database integration, it can also be used very effectively for
database backups like mysql and postgresql or cluster backups of the
same databases.

Re: timeshift

[Benson Muite]

Another option might be Sparkleshare:
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.sparkleshare.org_=DwIC-g=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=ZWoNtu0dmVVf-BHn8ZvUBVCW9zs7Sa8kTg39yd7Ih6A=uo5aPcSMdvzL0oExBf143Q2SeqBuQZqF_beKswqvJww= 
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__itsfoss.com_sparkleshare_=DwIC-g=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=ZWoNtu0dmVVf-BHn8ZvUBVCW9zs7Sa8kTg39yd7Ih6A=OqVyXuKNFLzUJGC5AEnZyFoHO0YvCEUZofALSZY0OkE= 


On 8/9/21 9:03 AM, Benson Muite wrote:

Timeshift seems not designed for backup of user data:
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__github.com_teejee2008_timeshift=DwIDaQ=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=kMBIIfIFkTneWcORRx8ddYtO_aX8m_-IaUWhXbWPxuM=IUh4tGgFYr-shVFiJfG-kSvSYfcoqaZ_nvPUykvvOgk= 
but rather to enable restore of the system state in case of problematic 
upgrades.


https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__fedoramagazine.org_easy-2Dbackups-2Dwith-2Ddeja-2Ddup_=DwIDaQ=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=kMBIIfIFkTneWcORRx8ddYtO_aX8m_-IaUWhXbWPxuM=1y4q7o0WeTvr4L9FxogjH0ZEuwfp2dmHAqIKf399yvI= 
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__fedoramagazine.org_butterfly-2Dbackup_=DwIDaQ=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=kMBIIfIFkTneWcORRx8ddYtO_aX8m_-IaUWhXbWPxuM=vYm-TG86j0AfVRLr1ElNr58zKbej1XtJWlxDw6pYsmI= 


Deja Dup is ok with an external hard drive.

Might also look at cloud backup services:
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.computer.org_publications_tech-2Dnews_trends_7-2Dbest-2Dcloud-2Dbackup-2Dservices=DwIDaQ=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=kMBIIfIFkTneWcORRx8ddYtO_aX8m_-IaUWhXbWPxuM=jP9BVhVYM5XAJ81-T-RMF3kzrLypgkr269Kxkul0Aq8= 


On 8/9/21 8:19 AM, Andrew Komornicki wrote:

Hi,

Have you considered just doing a tar on the /home directory on a
periodic basis, and just copy the tar file to a backup drive. Simple and
easy.

regards,
Andrew

Re: timeshift

[Benson Muite]

Timeshift seems not designed for backup of user data:
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__github.com_teejee2008_timeshift=DwIDaQ=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=kMBIIfIFkTneWcORRx8ddYtO_aX8m_-IaUWhXbWPxuM=IUh4tGgFYr-shVFiJfG-kSvSYfcoqaZ_nvPUykvvOgk= 
but rather to enable restore of the system state in case of problematic 
upgrades.


https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__fedoramagazine.org_easy-2Dbackups-2Dwith-2Ddeja-2Ddup_=DwIDaQ=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=kMBIIfIFkTneWcORRx8ddYtO_aX8m_-IaUWhXbWPxuM=1y4q7o0WeTvr4L9FxogjH0ZEuwfp2dmHAqIKf399yvI= 
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__fedoramagazine.org_butterfly-2Dbackup_=DwIDaQ=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=kMBIIfIFkTneWcORRx8ddYtO_aX8m_-IaUWhXbWPxuM=vYm-TG86j0AfVRLr1ElNr58zKbej1XtJWlxDw6pYsmI= 


Deja Dup is ok with an external hard drive.

Might also look at cloud backup services:
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.computer.org_publications_tech-2Dnews_trends_7-2Dbest-2Dcloud-2Dbackup-2Dservices=DwIDaQ=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=kMBIIfIFkTneWcORRx8ddYtO_aX8m_-IaUWhXbWPxuM=jP9BVhVYM5XAJ81-T-RMF3kzrLypgkr269Kxkul0Aq8= 


On 8/9/21 8:19 AM, Andrew Komornicki wrote:

Hi,

Have you considered just doing a tar on the /home directory on a
periodic basis, and just copy the tar file to a backup drive. Simple and
easy.

regards,
Andrew



On 8/8/2021 7:38 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:

Apple products and the Apple OS (currently based upon BSD) are
proprietary.� If one needs service (hardware or software), one
effectively must use an Apple store (at least in the USA).� The
colleague is retired and has little money (this is the downward mobile
USA economy save for the neo-liberal profiteers).� She got a used/refurb
Lenovo Carbon X1 and I just installed a working Linux on it --
everything worked "out of the box".

Reading more, Timeshift appears to be a systems, not end user files,
backup utility.� Any suggestions from anyone?

Take care.� Stay safe.

On 8/8/21 7:32 PM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:

On Sun, Aug 08, 2021 at 04:09:04PM -0700, Yasha Karant wrote:


Assuming that she obtains a, say 1 Tbyte, external USB drive
(powered from the USB port and either mechanical or SSD), she plans
to do incremental backups to the backup drive.

... what ... would anyone recommend?
... [need] tool [that] actually "works".



get a mac and use the built-in incremental backup tool called "time
machine".

spend more $$$, save on time, headache medicines and torn hair repair
(assuming you still had any).