this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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[โ€“] totikom@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I guess we disagree about the point of backups then.

We just use different threat models.)

For me, the main threat is disk failure, so I want to get new disk, restore system from backup and continue as if nothing happened.

Surely, if your hardware or OS configuration changes, you should not backup /usr, /etc and other folders.

However, the proposed workflow could be adapted to both scenarios: a single snapborg config backs up snapshots from a single subvolume, so I, actually, use two configs: one for /home excluding /home/.home_unbacked and another one for / excluding /var and some other directories. This two configs have different backup schedule and different retention policies, so in case of hardware/OS change, I'll just restore only /home backup without restoring /.

Makes sense.

I'm more interested in cutting off-site backup costs, so my NAS has RAID mirror to reduce chance of total failure, and offsite backup only stores important data. I don't even backup the bulk of it (ripped movies and whatnot), just the important data.

Restore from backup looks like this for my NAS:

  1. Install OS + podman
  2. Restore data from backup
  3. Build and deploy containers from config

Personal devices are similar, but installing packages is manual (perhaps I'll backup my explicitly stored package list or something to speed it up a little). Setup takes longer than your method, but I think it's worth the reduced storage costs since I've never actually needed to do it and a few hours of downtime is totally fine for me.