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):

  1. How do you reinstall your apps? I’m considering ansible for that - have all my installs (as much as possible) done through ansible playbooks.
  2. 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?

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    8·
    2 days ago
    1. I mean…that works, but any number of other ways works as well. Each distro has its own bootstrapping setup as well if you wanted to spend some extra time on it.
    2. Depends on what the data is. Ideally you can keep a distinct and separate /home that is mounted independently, but this can be troublesome sometimes depending on the distro. I keep a roaming profile setup on my NAS that gets mounted between my different machines. Some people just getting everything on a thumb drive. Whatever works for you. At the minimum, I’d keep your /home as a separate partition and mount.
    • Mihies@programming.devOP
      1·
      2 days ago

      Thanks for ideas, I’ll look into roaming profiles (but do you need similarly set computers then if profile was to work on all?). Also how much space do you allocate for a system partition (I guess the rest is all for /home) - I know this could be subjective?

      • just_another_person@lemmy.world
        3·
        2 days ago

        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.