[Discuss] On Backups

[Steve Litt]

Rich Pieri said on Tue, 17 Sep 2024 17:06:27 -0400

>The deduplication discussion got me thinking about how I do backups of
>my two "work" stations (read: where I play games, watch movies, and do
>all my other not actually work things like writing this). I had been
>using rsync to replicate data to my file server (ZFS, redundant
>storage, etc.) but this really isn't efficient in total. 

I've been using rsync for over two decades and it's proven easy and
restorable. But you used the word total...

>So I went
>looking at what cool options are available. I found a pair of programs
>that do what I want:
>
>First is Relax-and-Recover, aka ReaR. It partitions and formats a USB
>drive to be a bootable turn-key bare metal recovery device. It's
>limited to recovering to identical hardware which is fine for me.
>Emergency bare metal recovery is what I want from this aspect of
>backups.

I'll be adding this to my backup routine, if I can set it to only back
up the system stuff, leaving the data to be backed up by rsync.

>
>Transparency: I have been using ReaR since January because it is bare
>metal recovery in a more convenient form than Clonezilla.
>
>Second is restic. This is for file and filesystem recovery. There are
>many similar programs: borg, rdiff-backup, etc., but what makes restic
>stand out for me is the backups can be mounted as filesystems via FUSE.
>Mounting a backup set and browsing it like any filesystem is absolutely
>brilliant for restoring files.

My rsync system already does this. All that's needed is to mount my
backup drive read-only and copy off it.

As a substitute for ReaR, up until now I've been keeping a text version
of all the mounts, /etc/fstab, a text list of the results of lsblk, and
a text list of all the *manually* installed packages. In practice, I
only keep those up to date when I suspect they might be needed, so it's
pretty clear why ReaR would be superior to my current OS restore
system. Of course, on suspicion of need, I'll still *also* do my former
stuff along with ReaR. Thanks for the tip!

Following is a series of four backup articles I wrote over a span of
more than a decade. The first one was written when I still used
Windows, but all four maintain the same backup philosophy:

* https://www.troubleshooters.com/tpromag/9807.htm

* https://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/200208/200208.htm

* https://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/200609/200609.htm

* https://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/201408/201408.htm 

SteveT

Steve Litt 

http://444domains.com