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When did you last verify that your backup could be restored?
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 23 2020, @06:24PM (8 children)
That one amuses me. It also comes closest to what I have. A real "backup" would mean backing up system settings, including drivers, licenses, etc.
On Linux, just copying /home/user to an external drive is "backup" enough for me. Documents, emails, ebooks and other media, are all easily restored after the most catastrophic system failures. Migrate to a new system completely, and it "restores" equally well. Even your preferences within applications ride along, if you just reinstall those applications.
Real system settings are "lost" during a migration or hardware failures, but I can install and configure a Linux system pretty quickly.
Of course, what works for me won't pass for "best practices" for professional/commercial systems. ;^)
(Score: 3, Informative) by isj on Tuesday November 24 2020, @12:28PM
That is the same approach as I have for my laptop and workstation. I only back up /home. If I ever need to restore then I probably also want to install the latest OS, repartition, etc. The only thing I will miss on those machines is /root/.bash_history
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Thursday November 26 2020, @08:24PM (2 children)
On a desktop machine, where little more than the network requires setting, perhaps, although having a full system backup will save you the time of downloading and installing your favorite distro. On a server machine, where you might have tons of email messages and web pages, large databases, and who knows what else outside /home, having only a backup of /home is a recipe for disaster.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday December 01 2020, @09:06AM (1 child)
But you hopefully store your web pages, emails and databases in a known location, which you can then backup the same way as the home directory (though backing up a database might be better done in the form of a database dump).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by KritonK on Tuesday December 01 2020, @10:18AM
These known locations suddenly start to add up. It's much easier to simply backup one known location, /, and be done with it. It's not as if you're going to backup all these files by hand; the computer will do it for you, and with incremental backup solutions, such as rsync or duplicity, even the computer doesn't have to do much work.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday November 27 2020, @08:59AM
Yeah same. I backup /home and /space to an external drive occasionally and stick it on a shelf. If the machine dies, pfft. Reinstall, upgrade, reload what I want from old /home.
All the large files - music, movies etc - are on an external raid 5 box. I'd be annoyed if I lost it, but it wouldn't be catastrophic, its backup is the original CD's and DVD's in a box somewhere.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Thursday December 03 2020, @07:37PM (1 child)
25 years ago that was a shell script, 10 years ago that was a puppet installation, now a days that's ansible's job. If a human is setting the ntp server address by hand, that's a mistake.
I can go from freebsd boot image on the PXE server for physical or doing the vmware template thing on a virtual server, to a productive member of the cluster as a member of the active directory and everything in maybe 10, 15 minutes depending on the type of server.
Its convenient that mysql server #7 (or whatever example) is configured exactly the same as server #2 when it comes to troubleshooting and stuff.
Also joining a unix server to "big corporate" AD such that SSO fully works, is an afternoon's suffering if done completely by hand, but once 100% automated its like 90 seconds of the server time and it works.
Ansible kinda grows on you after awhile. Its just a pile of python it don't care about nothing so setting it up is also like 5 minutes of quality time with "pip" the python installer on any OS. I use freebsd and it works fine. Its a "push" system where I have to tell it where and when to push, whereas the old puppet was a seemingly simpler pull system, but not an entirely reliable pull system so it was a PITA when one machine's puppet puller failed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 06 2020, @12:18AM
That's what SHE said.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RS3 on Saturday December 05 2020, @08:39PM
I also copy /etc. Even if I recreate everything from a fresh install, it's usually extremely helpful (necessary) to at least see older settings, /etc/pki stuff, /etc/httpd/ for web/blog servers, /etc/my.cnf, ...