On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 07:24:18AM -0500, Jack Chastain wrote: > Greetings! > > I used the Backup util that comes with the distro (Deja-Dup I think?) and > it seemed fine - I even restored (to the same external USB HDD) and it was > functional. > > I wiped my existing (problematic) system and rebuilt it, then went to > restore my home dir from the backup - "No valid backups found" > > Surely it doesn't keep a locally-stored dataset it needs to restore? That > would be silly, wouldn't it? And - if it really DOES do that, how should I > protect against this kind of thing in the future - assuming that is > possible?
You TEST the backup system. [For me this goes back to a talk from Mike Kershaw about backups some years ago... that's what he said at the time, and I've kept it in mind.] Testing the backup system is trickier than it sounds -- you need to actually TEST your backups to make sure they work /for the situation/ you want them for, otherwise you won't really know if it'll do the job you need it to do. [Yes I actually do this now.] Thankfully in this case you didn't end up with any data loss, so that's good -- as such you ended up "testing" Deja-Dup and found out that it has some unexpected behavior compared to what you thought it would do. That either means it won't actually do what you had hoped, or perhaps you've used it in a way that Deja-Dup doesn't expect and/or doesn't automatically recover from. I'm not familiar with Deja-Dup myself, but the first thing I have in mind is "read the docs to see what it expects and what situations it covers you for". > And yes - I am going to go searching for "better" backup/restore ideas > based on our December meeting, but that's later. It really DID look like > this thing would actually work - guess I should know better. "I say we take off and nuke the entre site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." -- Ripley :-) -- -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org https://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College * Jan 7 - When Will Then Be Now? Soon. Feb 4 - Blender: The Open Source Graphics Program Mar 4 - Make With Meteor: Rapid Prototyping Of Real-Time, Mobile Web Apps
