Backups; desktop Mint 17, have a primary 1TB drive, secondary 3TB drive.
Linux - NewbieThis Linux forum is for members that are new to Linux.
Just starting out and have a question?
If it is not in the man pages or the how-to's this is the place!
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
Backups; desktop Mint 17, have a primary 1TB drive, secondary 3TB drive.
I'm looking for some general help here.
I do have TimeShift installed per the advice of a Linux user on another forum, and I believe it's working well.
From what I gather, TimeShift is only backing up - as I have it configured - the system 'state' to the 3TB drive.
What I'm wondering, aside from /home and /etc and /opt (some programs live in /opt and I've come to the understanding that backing up /etc is a good course of action), what else should I be backing up, and what's the best method to backup automatically?
And if I had a real disaster; say hard drive failure, I think the most reasonable and quickest bounce-back would be to have 'image' copies of my system drive, but I've been told that it's not really that easy (CloneZilla for example must be run outside of the OS, is there another way?) and not really a reasonable way to backup my Linux box.
Instead I've been told to simply back up my user data (don't know where it is aside from the /home /opt and /etc dirs?) and nuke from orbit (format and reinstall from ISO)...
What I'm most comforable with has been image backups and deduped incrementals coming from an IT role with Windows boxes.
Any suggestions on wrapping my head around this and coming up with a game plan?
I also have a few VirtualBox VMs on this Linux box that I'd like to have backed up, and I know the images are quite large. If there's a way to have those backed up regularly, automatically, that would be quite useful.
For automatic user data backup to a second disk on my PC, I find
Code:
backup2l
to be excellent. It runs on a automated daily basis to create differential backups in tar.gz form. This means that even if you should the ability to run the restore program you can still access your backups directly.
Try to exclude data held in cache files.
It depends on how much effort you're willing to undertake if you do have a crash. I'm firmly in the camp of "Backup all your data." Now, anything that is known to be temporary (contents of /tmp, /var/tmp, ...) can be omitted, and anything in a cache directory can be omitted since it is "just a cache" and will be automatically regenerated or reloaded if needed. Also, directories that are virtual filesystems (/proc, /sys, /dev, .gvfs) do not exist on disk and should not be backed up. I've got a few other things that I specifically exclude (thumbnails, Trash, lock files created by running processes, ...), but everything else gets backed up.
Once I have a backup scheme in place, I run a test by replacing my disk drive with a blank one and seeing what it would take to do a bare metal recovery from just my backup. That can be quite illuminating.
I'm with rknichols in the "Backup all your data" camp. Linux is a lot better than Windows at working when restored from a backup taken while the system is running.
Your VB VMs: are they running or shut down when you want to back them up. If they are running, which OS are they running?
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.