Wife wants to backup things on her Leap.
what would be the minimum recommended backup.
I know she wants her personal things, but are there other part(s) of the system to backup.
OR, get a big enough USB stick and back up the complete system?
Hi
I’m only interested in data and some config changes, takes less that an hour for me to be back up and running… I use cronopete to copy (well rsync) to a USB connected drive.
I have some vague remembrance of you being the system manager of your wife’s system. That means that your wife is at the maximum responsable for making backups of her own data (most probably all in her home directory).
You are responsable for the system files that need backup. You, as system manger, should be able to restore her system to working order from a disaster (either on the same hardware, or e.g. after a fire, on new hardware). She then can restore her own data. Your user/wife has no root password and thus can never be responsible for the backup of system files.
But, you as system manager can offer as a service to your users (which I assume is not only your wife, but also yourself) for making backups of user data together with system data. In that case you can of course restore a whole system including user data after a disaster. But in that case you must also be able to restore as a service within a reasonable amount of time any user file that a user may have lost (unwanted delete, complete malformed during an edit session, whatever), because that is one important reason for user backups, being able to recover from user stupidities.
Hehe, yes, well said. “at the maximum”! From a (i.e. my) wife’s point of view that means: “not at all!” lol! Her maximum responsibility is getting annoyed if things don’t work immediately as expected. (and bringing me some tea if things are serious in her productive environment.)
Since disk space is not the major issue anymore I have given up on searching for the folders with “important” settings next to the actual user data. I have settled with backing up the full user’s home or rather syncing it with a copy on my homeserver so I can access same data from the laptop. From the server I’m doing the backup to an internal and and an external disk - all with unison and nfs.
A backup of /etc/ from time to time may be useful - just in case. It doesn’t take too much time or space and is a good help in case of mentioned system disaster. - Hm, haven’t done that for a while… :rolleyes:
I did not want to comment on what I do not know: your, as system manager, backup and restore policy. There are myriads of ideas and solutions about that. I only want to stress that system manager and users are different identities (you are not only the system manager of many systems but maybe also a user on one or more of those systems). IMHO a system manager always has to take care of those different roles (this is NOT MS Windows!, but a multi-user, multi-session operating system).
So you can create a backup policy that includes backups of user data as a service. But you have to communicate very clear to the users what they can expect from you in terms of save and secure backups and restore of individual files or all of their data. E.g. like: you can ask me for a file you lost but I will only have the version between last saturday and the saturday before that (when you make a weekly backup on saturdays without keeping older snapshots).
When the user then wants more for certain files, (s)he can then of course make backups of them on e.g. a memory stick when wanted.
It may also be important to communicate to your users how save their data is. Do you store it on another system, in another house, etc. This to give them an idea where their own responsability starts.
Users can replace faulty hardware at any time. However loss of data can’t be undone: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/77tb-of-critical-research-data-lost-because-of-hpe-software-update I currently perform daily syncs to internal hard disk, monthly syncs to external hard disk and quarterly syncs to distant locations.
To ensure hassle-free operation I fully backup /home. Using your applications on different machines is a great way to ensure consistency of everything involved. I made it into a habit to build the web albums on all machines. This helped fixing some flaws in the backup process as well as in the application generating the web albums.
Syncs run in the background unobtrusively:
**erlangen:~ #** journalctl --since 00:00 -u back* -o short-monotonic -q
[46044.822815] erlangen systemd[1]: Starting Backup /home...
[46044.823723] erlangen systemd[1]: Starting Backup RPM database...
[46044.823982] erlangen systemd[1]: Starting Backup /etc/sysconfig directory...
[46044.870800] erlangen systemd[1]: backup-sysconfig.service: Deactivated successfully.
[46044.871281] erlangen systemd[1]: Finished Backup /etc/sysconfig directory.
[46045.523943] erlangen systemd[1]: backup-rpmdb.service: Deactivated successfully.
[46045.524144] erlangen systemd[1]: Finished Backup RPM database.
[46063.905924] erlangen systemd[1]: backup-home.service: Deactivated successfully.
[46063.906312] erlangen systemd[1]: Finished Backup /home.
[46063.906409] erlangen systemd[1]: **backup-home.service: Consumed 16.096s CPU time.**
**erlangen:~ #**