Earlier quoted context omitted.
/home/etc or ~/etc?
Those are equivalent.
Try it for yourself:
[ /home/etc = ~/etc ] || echo theyre different
Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
131–140 of 180 posts
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Enjoyed the post, thanks. One question: why don’t you use restic+rclone on macOS? They both support it and I’d assume you could simplify your system a bit…
I only have one macOS system (a Mac Mini) and Arq works well for me. Also I prefer to use Time Machine for the local backups (to a USB3 SSD) on macOS since Apple gives Time Machine all sorts of special treatment in the OS, especially when it comes time to do a hardware upgrade.
I’ve also found Arq to be brilliant on MacOS. It’s especially nice on laptops, where you can e.g. set it to pause on battery and during working hours. Also, APFS snapshots is a nice thing given how many Mac apps use SQLite databases under the hood (Photos, Notes, Mail, etc.).
On Linux, the system I liked best was rsnapshot: I love its brutal simplicity (cron + rsync + hardlinks), and how easy it is to browse previous snapshots (each snapshot is a real folder with real files, so you can e.g. ripgrep through a date range). But when my backups grew larger I eventually moved to Borg to get better deduplication + encryption.
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#133My system is different and simpler: The root partition / and the home partition /home are different. There's a /home/etc/ folder with a very small set of configuration files I want to save, everything else is nuked on reinstall. When I do a reinstall, the root partition is formatted, the /home partition is not. This allows me to test different distros and not be tied to any particular distro or any particular backup…
The implication here is that your home directory can actually work across distros? How in the world do you do that? Surely you have to encounter errors sometimes when cached data or configs point to nonexistent paths, or other incompatibilities come up?
Typically ~ contains user specific config files for applications, which are (usually) programmed to be distro agnostic. If you're installing the same applications across distros, I don't see why this wouldn't work without too much effort. After all, most distros are differentiated by just two things:
- their package management tooling
- their filesystem layout (eg where do libraries etc go)
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#134I've probably spent way too much time thinking about Linux backup over the years. But thankfully, I found a setup that works really well for me in 2018 or so, used it for the last few years, and I wrote up a detailed blog post about it just a month ago: https://amontalenti.com/2024/06/19/backups-restic-rclone The tools I use on Linux for backup are restic + rclone, storing my restic repo on a speedy USB3 SSD. For off…
I used to use restic with scripting, then I discovered resticprofile, and swiftly replace all my scripts with it. https://github.com/creativeprojects/resticprofile I also use Kopia as an alternative to Restic, in case some critical bugs happen to either one of them. https://kopia.io/
Personally, I've had some issues with Kopia.
I found their explanation here:
https://github.com/kopia/kopia/issues/1764
https://github.com/kopia/kopia/issues/544
Still not solved after many years :(
Now I use Borg + Restic and I am happy
+ GUI for Restic https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest
+ GUI for Borg https://github.com/borgbase/vorta
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#135Isn't timeshift what apple calls their snapshot/backup thingy?
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#136I use BackInTime, which works in a similar way but is much more configurable. I have hourly backups of all my code for the past day, then a single daily for the past week, etc. Saved my ass a few times.
I've used BackInTime since 2010. I loved that, even without using the tool, you could just poke through the file structure, and get an old version of any backed up file.
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#137Timeshift saved my system so many times over the past 6-7 years. Botched upgrades, experimenting with desktop environments, destroying configuration defaults, it works and does what it says on the tin.
How can you "botch" upgrades so many times? I may have had only one update that went wrong in 30 years of using Linux and that was just a bug introduced by a gfx driver in a new minor kernel version. I downgraded it and waited for the bug to be fixed upstream and that was it.
bravo, I guess?
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nixpkgs is the largest and most up to date package repository according to https://repology.org/ I'm honestly curious what packages you have a problem with
Proprietary package vendors often provide a. deb that assumes Ubuntu. Maybe also a. rpm for RedHat if you're lucky.
That's definitely true, but maybe I've just been lucky, pretty much every proprietary program I've wanted to install in NixOS has been in Nixpkgs.
Skype, Steam, and Lightworks are all directly available in the repos and seem to work fine as far as I can tell. I'm sure there are proprietary packages that don't work or aren't in the repo, but I haven't really encountered them.
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I only have one macOS system (a Mac Mini) and Arq works well for me. Also I prefer to use Time Machine for the local backups (to a USB3 SSD) on macOS since Apple gives Time Machine all sorts of special treatment in the OS, especially when it comes time to do a hardware upgrade.
I’ve also found Arq to be brilliant on MacOS. It’s especially nice on laptops, where you can e.g. set it to pause on battery and during working hours. Also, APFS snapshots is a nice thing given how many Mac apps use SQLite databases under the hood (Photos, Notes, Mail, etc.). On Linux, the system I liked best was rsnapshot: I love its brutal simplicity (cron + rsync + hardlinks), and how easy it is to browse previous…
rsnapshot was definitely my favorite Linux option before restic. I find that restic gives me the benefits of chunk-based deduplication and encryption, but via `restic find` and `restic mount` I can also get many of the benefits of rsnapshot's simplicity. If you use `restic mount` against a local repo on a USB3 SSD, the FUSE filesystem is actually pretty fast.
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't tell you the number of times I see a project and think to myself "NixOS already solves that problem but better."
Imagine installing an entirely new window manager without issue, and then undoing it without issue. NixOS does that. And I'm pretty sure that no other flavor of Linux does. First time I realized I could just blithely "shop around window managers" simply by changing a couple of configuration lines, I was absolutely floored. NixOS is the first Linux distro that made me actually feel like I was free to enjoy and tinker…
Completely agree; being able to transparently know what the system is going to do by just looking at a few lines of text is sort of game-changing. It's trivial to add and remove services, and you can be assured that you actually added and removed them, instead of just being "pretty sure" about it.
Obviously this is just opinion (no need for someone to supply nuance) but from my perspective the NixOS model is so obviously the "correct" way of doing an OS that it really annoys me that it's not the standard for every operating system. Nix itself is an annoying configuration language, and there are some more arcane parts of config that could be smoothed over, but the model is so obviously great that I'm willing to put up with it. If nothing else, being able to trivially "temporarily" install a program with nix-shell is a game-changer to me; it changes the entire way of how I think about how to use a computer and I love it.
Flakes mostly solve my biggest complaint with NixOS, which was that it was kind of hard to add programs that weren't merged directly into the core nixpkgs repo.