this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
55 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
48378 readers
1460 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If you want to be able to restore the machine completely, with everything installed and configured, then yes you have to backup everything. There's generally two ways, file-level backup where you'd use something like rsync, tar, etc. and block-level where you'd backup the whole partition/disk using something like dd, clonezilla, etc. The latter is the easiest to restore but it's a bit of a pain to backup because the system generally has to be offline, booted from alternative OS. The forner is a bit more difficult to restore but not by much, and it's so easier to backup. You can do it while the system is live. I'd probably try that first. Find documentation on backing up a complete root filesystem with rsync/tar and you're good to go. Some ideas. It's typically a single command which can be run on a schedule.
The built-in GUI backup tool is generally intended for your own user data. In order to be able to backup other things it'll have to run as root or be given caps and that might get more complicated than using straight rsync/tar.
You can use Borg for both things you mentioned. It stores deduplicated chunks so it doesn't care if you backup files or a block device.
Not sure why you'd have to be offline to do that though.
Because if you're not offline, something is writing to the filesystem and changing blocks while you're copying. If you're lucky what you copied would be outdated. If you're less lucky it would cause fs inconsistency which would be cleaned up by fsck. If you are even less lucky you'd end up with silently corrupted files, e.g. a text file with old parts mixed with new. If you're even less lucky, you'd hit a vital metadata part of the fs and it would not be mountable anymore.
To clarify, the filesystem being block-copied has to be offline or mounted RO, not the whole OS. However if that's the root/home filesystem, then you can't unmount it while the OS is online.
If you don't want to deal with that you need a filesystem or volume manager that supports snapshots, then you can copy the snapshot. E.g. snapshot your root LVM vol, then block-copy the snapshot.