On 8/22/2025 8:07 PM, Tim wrote:
Tim:
For people that want to upgrade over the top and keep existing data
(preferring to have to re-import from a backup), I think the simplest
solution is a two drive PC.
One drive is your OS and programs, the other drive is your data.
home user:
I'm planning for the new desktop (for which I want the better back-up)
to be dual boot: Fedora + one other t.b.d. Linux distro. I don't know
if that matters. If it matters, the purpose of this thread is planning:
the new desktop needs to have enough bays(?), power, space, cooling, and
so on. I am anticipating 2 SSDs. Whether I should put both distros on
the same SSD and use the other for personal data, or one distro +
personal data per SSD, I don't yet know. I'll have to include what you
said above in my considerations.
It's always very useful to have more drive bays in a box (and SATA
slots on the board for them). Apart from future planning (expanding
your storage space, additional operating systems, spacing drive further
apart for better ventilation, etc), it's very hand for recovery options
to be able to simply plug in another drive to rescue things to. And
on-board SATA is (generally) much faster than USB connected drives. As
well as having a better power supply than a drive on a USB port.
Personally, I still have more faith in harddrives than SSDs for data.
Why? I'm not skeptical; this is a sincere question.
So I have a SSD for an OS & programs drive, with data on a harddrive.
My sense is that with a hard drive, there's a real chance of getting
advance warning (via S.M.A.R.T.) when it's near failure. But with SSDs,
I've not seen or heard of any monitoring; failure is sudden, no
warning. Are SSDs S.M.A.R.T. monitored?
It did not occur to me to include in the original post that I have a
stand-alone desktop - only one, no laptops/notebooks, no cell phones, no
routers, no network/LAN/WAN/WiFi. There is one ethernet connection via
phone modem.
The more data you tell people the better.
I was probably mixing you up with the guy who did tech support for a
number of clients who don't plan for anything going wrong. An
automated back-up *thing* on the network is a simple addition to
someone else's business LAN. For Macs and PCs it can be a simple case
of enabling the system-provided backup system, and telling it what
drive to backup and where to.
I've been doing it manually. (I'm a control freak.) I need to re-think
that.
I also always check the back-up (diff command).
Being not an IT professional, this seems complicated to me. I'll dig
into it, but I'm not optimistic. I need simple.
Unless all you do is simply drag and drop your entire homespace to an
external drive to copy it, all back-up methods involve a fair amount of
complexity (likewise with restorations). You get to choose how much
you want.
There are options for de-duplication, exclusion of certain things (such
as your web-browser's cache does not need backing up, and would be next
to impossible to restore; program files could be simply reinstalled
rather than trying to restore them). Compression of files to save
space. Scheduling. Rolling backups, where you always have something
like 7 days worth, and it automatically removes the older-than 7 days
backups.
There are even systems which back-up as you go. So every time you save
a file, a back-up is made. Avoiding the problem of file loss from a
failure before a scheduled overnight backup.
I need to dig into these more.
I know I want to exclude almost all $HOME's "hidden" directories. But I
know I want to include ".thunderbird", especially calendar data.
I made the costly mistake of failing to include $HOME's hidden files.
I recognize there's no perfect solution. But I realize I can and need
to do better.
Thank-you, Tim.
--
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