Re: [tlug] Move the OS to a different partition?

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2019-10-13 00:16 +0200 (Sun), Christian Horn wrote:

> The even simpler way would be to also do a backup, not restore the
> whole Linux installation from the backup but reinstall the Linux
> distro, and afterwards just restore /home .

This.

You want to be thinking not about "backups," which are quite easy to
make if you're not worried about how you're going to restore them, and
instead about "disaster recovery," i.e., how you're going to make sure
you can get back up and running with your information intact should
a disk fail, a machine get eaten by a grue, or similar.

So this is an excellent opportunity to figure out where your personal
data are, how to ensure that copies of it are regularly made to
another host or service somewhere, and how to restore it on a fresh
system. Your recovery procedure could be as simple as just keeping
essential stuff in Dropbox (using a script to copy or tar up homedir
stuff into a backup area on dropbox), reinstalling Linux and
installing Dropbox again. I use this for a fair amount of stuff.

Much of my stuff is also in Git repos; copies of these to which you
push regularly can be kept on your own other hosts, as private repos
on GitHub or GitLab, or as bare repos on Dropbox or any other file
sync service. This can make sorting out conflicts considerably easier
than if you just copy files around.

For my home dir configuration files, I've got a whole system called
dot-home[1] that helps deal with tracking configuration, updating it
between hosts, generating different configurations from different sets
of repos for hosts of different sensitivity (so I don't have, e.g., my
mail configs on a public host I share with others, but do have my bash
and vim configuration and the like), and so on. I'm happy to give
workshops on this or, even better, work with others to improve this.
(It really wants a rewrite from Bash to Python to improve things all
around.)

[1]: https://github.com/dot-home

cjs
-- 
Curt J. Sampson      <cjs@example.com>      +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
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