Re: [gentoo-user] Backup [Was: Old Firefox ebuild?]

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 1:35 AM, Ian Zimmerman <itz@×××××××.net> wrote:
> On 2016-10-15 05:42, Kai Krakow wrote:
>
>> The backup source is my btrfs subvol 0. I can put the systemd units
>> for backup to github if you're interested.
>
> I'm not a systemd fan, so they wouldn't help me, but thanks for
> offering.

I'd be curious to see them; whether you use systemd or not units are
pretty trivial to read and make use of in scripts, cron entries, etc.

I just use snapper to manage snapshots if all I'm worried about is
casual deletion of files.  Since I don't fully trust btrfs I also keep
a full rsnapshot (basically an rsync wrapper) of my btrfs volumes on a
local ext4.

>
> My priorities are different, and there are constraints resulting from my
> priorities as well as others.
>
> I am mostly worried about physical catastrophic damage (I live in
> earthquake country) and losing my personal data, which could not be
> recreated.  So it has to be offsite, and because it's personal data it
> has to be encrypted.  And I cannot make the trip to where it's stored
> every day.
>
> Given the time (including the trip) it takes to restore, I don't see the
> point of backing up static files which can be reinstalled from the
> distribution.  Of course, I'm still learning gentoo and so it was easy
> for me to make the mistake of forgetting that files under /usr/portage
> aren't really in that catagory.
>

++

What I really consider my "backups" are stored encrypted on amazon s3
using duplicity (which I highly recommend for this purpose).
Basically it amounts to /etc, and /home, with a number of exclusions
(media and cache).  For media I care about like photos I include new
stuff in m duplicity backups, but as I accumulate reasonable chunks of
it I make a separate backup and store it offsite, and remove that
chunk from my duplicity backup.  This prevents the daily-updated
backup pool from getting insanely large, while still maintaining an
offsite copy (since these files don't change over time).

I'd never spend the money to be doing cloud backup of /usr (other than
/usr/local).  I have all my static configuration backed up, so I could
just restore that onto a stage 3 and run emerge -uDN world to get all
of that back.

If I did have an offsite server somewhere where storage costs weren't
a big deal then I'd probably be setting up replicas using
btrfs+zfs-send/receive.  You can do that at minimal cost with
incrementals, and I could probably do the first clone on the local
LAN.

-- 
Rich