On Sun, Aug 14, 2022, at 5:08 PM, Bill Cunningham wrote: > I just thought I would ask for opinions on backups that people use. > I have thought about the old fashioned dump/restore; IDK if that would > be good for modern use or not. My system isn't really that big. My > allotted size is 30 Gig, and it's not full. There's dar and xar and > fsarchiver. There's backing up with btrfs too.
I mainly backup just /home because I consider everything else replaceable. So for that it's # mount /dev/nvme0n1p5 /mnt ##mount top-level of btrfs # cd /mnt # btrfs sub snap -r home home.20220815 $ sudo btrfs send -p home.20220810 home.20220815 | ssh chris@fnuc.local "sudo btrfs receive /srv/backups/fovo/" That's it. Incremental backup using btrfs send/receive over ssh, where /srv/backups/fovo is also btrfs. These are quite cheap because no deep traversal is required on either side. Btrfs keeps a generation number on each file, so it's cheap for it to locate files that differ. This cheapness also applies to rename and moving files, if you move a big file, most other methods require delete in one location and copy to another location, whereas btrfs sees that it's moved on the source and merely moves it on the destination. Ok that's not entirely it. There is clean up. You can keep them around as long as you want with no ill impact, but when you decide to clean up, you can remove all the snapshots except the most recently sent, i.e. you want a common snapshot on the local and remote systems, in order to preserve the ability to do an incremental send/receive. The same goes for the remote - you can keep those indefinitely, limited only by space available. Or clean them up leaving just one in common with send and receive sides. > > I am thinking about back ups of the whole system and rpms I have > installed. And maybe not backing up logs, old settings like are stored > in the root directory of the user(s) and root account. You could also employ the same technique above to the "root" subvolume. But it'll include logs unless you split that out with a separate subvolume in the top-level along side root and home subvolumes, and add to fstab so it mounts at /var/log I really don't often backup / though. What I do tend to do semi-often is replicate a root between systems, virtual and real. The part I like about send/receive here, even though it's not any faster than rsync or even cp -a, is that everything is preserved: permissions, owner, selinux labels, all of the time stamps (otime, atime, mtime, ctime); I just don't have to think about it. I could use btrbk to help automate all of this, but what can I say, I'm a bit lazy and I'd have to think about it a little bit. It really is cheap enough you could kick off a backup every 10 minutes if you want. It'd take a couple seconds for it to figure out what's changed and whether the parent snapshot is already on the destination. And then it's just the time to transfer the data that's changed. So for a single file changed in 10 minutes, it could take just a couple seconds. -- Chris Murphy _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
