G’day Bill,
I think if you want to do it daily, you need something simple and incremental like rsync to an external disk.
A full backup every day would be too tedious.
What backup software do you use?
Cheers
Neville
Neville:
I have tried a number of backup programs (but not rsync, come to think of it) and haven’t found a better solution than to form the habit of always saving to the desktop, then sweeping from the desktop folder to my external drive (or sometimes to Dropbox). Making the external save a habit works for me, but then I don’t create a lot of content, being one of the lazy retired class.
Question for you: if, say, I’m sandboxing on my extra harddrive with some new distro, will rsync ADD the Home folder to the Home folder in my external drive or will it REPLACE it? By intentionally backing data up, I can be careful not to overwrite things I don’t want to overwrite. Don’t know if rsync is that careful.
Cheers!
Hi @berninghausen (Bill)
If the filename is the same, but the content is different, rsync will update the file on external disk.
So if you want to preserve the old content, use a new filename for the changes.
If you remove a file on HD, rsync -a which is archive mode, will not remove the file on external disk. archive means keep forever.
There are, however, other , non-archive , ways of using rsync, and they will delete a file on external drive, if you delete it on HD. I stay away from those, i think they are dangerous.
You have to study the option flags for rsync … I know there are lots of them. I will get my favourite set of flags for you, when I get to the PC later.
Cheers
Neville
Hi @berninghausen (Bill)
I put all my files in a partition that is mounted as /common
To back it up with rsync , I make sure I have an external disk mounted on /run/media/nevj/Linux-external
then I do
rsync -aAXvH /common/* /run/media/nevj/Linux-external/common
all one line.
So I have the -a option … archive
plus several others
The trailing / in /common/ means I want to sync the files, but not the directory, which is just a mount point.
I also do backups with tar as needed but about once a month.
I make tarfiles of home directories, as well as /common.
All that is in my home directories is dot files.
So why the two? Well the rsync stops me losing recent work, and is easy. The tarfiles are a longer term archive, but require some effort.
Cheers
Neville
I appreciate the thorough explanation. I have relatively little data to save, so I can simply copy and paste my Home folder to a new dated file on my external hard drive. There should be enough room for 20 years or so, at which point I will be 95 and not concerned. Then there’s the 2T mirrored NAS my son gifted us with.
Cheers!
That is nice and simple and foolproof… like a backup or an archive should be.
I wouldnt mind your NAS system
Neville
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Neville, I never considered the expense of a NAS, but being gifted from a son, why not?! It may be the optimum remote storage medium.
Forming the habit of always storing important stuff outside the current operating system might be the most important behavior we can encourage. Beginners need to hear that advice early and often.
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Using a Dell laptop Latitude E6330 (model was new in 2013) having bought it second hand in 2018 , it still runs Linux Mint 20.3 perfectly well . Shortly
I 'll install Mint 21.
As far as I am concerned there is no need at all to buy a new Laptop with Linux , even not a new laptop with M$oft-Windows . Any old Dell or HP laptop with a 64bit CPU will suit my Linux needs , but preferably one with easy access to the HD ,changing it for an SSD.
Frank in county Wicklow Ireland
Hi Frank,
I am about to do just that. I had an old 32 bit Laptop which expires then recovers at irregular intervals.
How do I tell what is an easy access HD?
I am looking at Dell or Lenovo… Did not think of HP till you mentioned it.
Concerned about secure BIOS issues. Do you know of any that are to be avoided for that reason?
Regards
Neville
Actually, the frequency of taking a backup depends on the timeframe you can afford to loose your data. If you can afford to loose data you gathered over a month, a monthly backup will be sufficient. If you only can afford to loose your data gathered in a hour, you need to take backup hourly to be safe.
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I don’t do backups on my main desktop machine…
I do backup my Pi3B running Buster - it’s got a 500 GB SSD - tar and rsync (and gzip) :
Crontab :
30 6 */7 * * /usr/local/bin/bkup-beere.bash 2>&1
bkup-beere.bash has an exclude list :
root@beere253:~# cat /usr/local/bin/exl.txt
/backup
/archive
/etc/pihole
/home/x/ResilioSync
/home/x/.cache
/home/x/.config
/proc
/sys
/dev
/mnt
/media
/tmp
/var/spool
/var/tmp
root@beere253:~# cat /usr/local/bin/bkup-beere.bash
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# backup this RPi
# use rsync to dump to /backup, then use tar to archive content of /backup to tgz file in /archive
# RUNTIME=$(date +'%Y%m%d-%H%M')
PROG=$(basename "$0")
BOX=$(uname -n)
RUNTIME=$(date +'%Y%m%d')
EXL="/usr/local/bin/exl.txt"
RSYDIR=/backup
TARDIR=/archive
[[ ! -d $RSYDIR ]] && mkdir $RSYDIR
[[ ! -d $TARDIR ]] && mkdir $TARDIR
# /backup
# /home/x/ResilioSync
# /proc
# /sys
# /dev
set -vx
rsync -av --exclude-from=$EXL / $RSYDIR/.
tar czvpf $TARDIR/bkup-$BOX-$RUNTIME.tgz $RSYDIR/*
## tidy up :
rm -Rf $RSYDIR/*
There’s a bit of debugging stuff in there I think - hence “# /backup”… essentially what my initial exl.txt file consisted of…
since december 2020… touch wood - never needed to restore… need to automate some housekeeping (I manually go and delete mid month backups… and only keep EOM (i.e. first week of the month) backups long term)…
I’m so gosh darn lazy - I actually have plenty of hardware lying around, SCSI cards, and even an LTO2 tape unit (I think the carts can go to 1 TB) with quite a few spare LTO cards … But I’m lazy… and complacent… I had a whole rack mount JBOD that took SATA drives, 24 slots… chucked it out on the verge (and yeah - someone scrounged it before the garbage collection could).
Hi Neville , Dell and HP laptops usually give easy physical access to the HD
such that one can quickly replace an existing HD by an SSD.
My advice on the SSD size ,get one with minimal 256GB even when only a fraction of this capacity is actually used. During regular use an increasing number of “cells” will die ,but with spare capacity it does not matter so much and a long life of the device will be guaranteed. Following years of frequent use none of my SSDs have died .
I do not have experience with Lenovo laptops but it could well be that the HD or SSD can only be changed by stripping the machine. When you consider one always have a good look at the bottom for a removable cover to access the storage device.
Sofar I never have had problems with changing the boot sequence in the BIOS even not in a Chinese fanless mini-PC with 2core i7 Intel CPU which in 2018 came with a Chinese version of Windows XP. Following the removal of Win-XP with Gparted it now happily runs Zorin 16 (core version)
If my 12yrs old desktop PC with first generation i7 CPU ever packs up I will replace it by such a fanless mini-PC, powered by 12V-DC.
For your machine with 32 bit CPU , I recommend the latest MX-Linux , an excellent distro ,freely available for both 64 and 32 bit PCs
Good Luck with your endeavours
Regards
Frank in County Wicklow - Ireland
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Thanks Frank,
Just checked the old 32 bit . It has a panel, so I know what to look for now.
Maybe a Dell 7480… some come with an ssd. Might be better to buy an hd one and get a new ssd.
Cheers
Neville
MX-21 has replaced Mint and *buntu in my preferences, to second your recommendation,
Frank. I’m especially fond of the KDE desktop as implemented by MX.
Hi Bill,
I tried MX/KDE 64 bjt. I quite liked it . Have it archived on a USB drive.
The KDE was a couple of versions behind what you get
in Void, but it was not very different from the latest.
I guess MX is tied to Debians timetable.
Also MX is sysvinit, not systemd.
Cheers
Neville