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   billy joe bowers-8647 (billyjoebowers@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 30-Jan-2025 17:45:30 JST billy joe bowers-8647

   I still find the whole subject of backups in Linux really confusing. Every time I read up on it I end up just blowing it off.

   I feel like backups are pretty important. Why is this so hard?

   #Linux

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 30-Jan-2025 17:45:30 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @billyjoebowers Backups are at a really hard point of the CIA triad. They're a huge exposure surface not just for breaking present data confidentiality but past data too. And many ways to mitigate this increase the risk to availability (data loss, confidence that you have complete restorable backups).

   • Embed this notice
     Truls (truls46@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 30-Jan-2025 17:47:20 JST Truls

     in reply to

     @billyjoebowers I have heard good things about BorgBackup.

     In the end, you could just setup a shell script doing rsync to an external drive.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 30-Jan-2025 17:47:20 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Truls

     @truls46 @billyjoebowers Redundancy is not a backup. This will happily rsync a wiped or cryptolockered system over top of your "backup".

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 30-Jan-2025 18:07:08 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Truls

     @truls46 It would wipe if they'd been replaced with maliciously encrypted versions of their prior contents, or if you'd accidentally modified them in lossy ways. Even something as innocent as browser profile getting corrupted on crash & losing everything on next sync.

   • Embed this notice
     Truls (truls46@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 30-Jan-2025 18:07:09 JST Truls

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @dalias

     rsync can be told to only add, but not remove files if I'm not mistaken, so it would not wipe anything.

     But what's your recommendation for a stable and easy to use backup using Linux?

   • Embed this notice
     billy joe bowers-8647 (billyjoebowers@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 30-Jan-2025 18:10:09 JST billy joe bowers-8647

     in reply to

     I guess there's no getting around having to backup the system and personal data separately? Everything I read acts like that's a given. What a pain in the ass.

   • Embed this notice
     Steve's Place (steter@mastodon.stevesworld.co)'s status on Thursday, 30-Jan-2025 18:10:09 JST Steve's Place

     in reply to

     @billyjoebowers The reason is that Linux is for both personal use and for servers in data centers. And some people write confusing documentation.

     Timeshift makes it easy to restore just the system files, should an upgrade wreak havoc. It hasn't happened in years, but in the current political climate, it is a good idea to be able to just roll it all back with a mouse click to a prior running version. It's installed, but you need to point its data at a separate disk from the boot disk. This is a very easy backup solution for the system. Super easy.

     The Backup utility (also should be installed) concept is that your home directory tree is where your personal files are. Backing them up separately makes some sense in that, if all you want to do is restore that, why screw with the system file backup to do it? At one company, we kept a gzipped tarball of every customer's home folders made several times a day, and we also had backups.

     A complete backup system is BackupPC. You'd need to install that one yourself using apt. I've used it to back up commercial servers before. It has been around forever. It can backup and restore more than Linux, but it requires installing some code on systems to be backed up. It keeps one copy of identical files, reducing the space it needs. If you want a full backup system, it's great. It doesn't care if it's system files or not. I don't usually install BackupPC for small stuff.

     Timeshift does a really good job.

     Backup (the utility) is fine.

     That's really all you need, for most users. If you'd prefer to do it from the command line in a single string of strange and magical incantations, just ask!

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 30-Jan-2025 18:10:12 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Truls

     @truls46 As for my recommendation, I've heard good things about Borg. I use bakelite which I made and which has stronger cryptographic properties, but it doesn't have polished UI or setup workflow - I need to get to that someday.

     https://github.com/richfelker/bakelite

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 30-Jan-2025 18:23:08 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Truls

     @truls46 By having the backup medium be enforced append-only from backup clients, and keeping enough past (preferably incremental so you don't need astronomical amounts of storage) images that you're sure to have one before unnoticed catastrophic loss.

   • Embed this notice
     Truls (truls46@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 30-Jan-2025 18:23:09 JST Truls

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @dalias Ah, that's what you mean. Yes, absolutely. How can you protect your (automatic) backup strategy against that?