I’m going to move away from Windows into Linux and have some strategical questions, among others how do you handle backups/restore and how do you switch distros.
There are two main questions (in case of catastrophic failure or transition):
- How do you reinstall your apps? I’m considering ansible for that - have all my installs (as much as possible) done through ansible playbooks.
- How do you recover your backup data? Just copy from backup to home directory probably won’t do when it comes to a different distro, or? Here I’m considering doing ZFS snapshosts (ZFS pool/datasets would be used for my home directory) to my backup server but not sure how to recover it in case of switching to a different distro. It should be copy in the case of system restoration I guess.
Any other recommendations?
For roaming profiles: there’s lots of different ways to do whatever you want. For example, I don’t pull in my entire homedir when I login, I just use systemd automount profiles for specific things. This solves two problems: 1) If my network goes down, I won’t have issues with my machine, and 2) there isn’t a need for a lot of I/O on the network unless I’m actually accessing specific data. Just found a quick thread for reference where people are discussing.
For partitioning, this isn’t much of a worry anymore if you use LVM, so I’d get familiar with that, and then you can shrink/grow all your partitions as needed if you want.