I have tested a lot of atomic and traditional distributions lately. Tons of desktop environments strictly for fun and branching out. Having a 1 2 3 backup strategy and not just having it in place, but being able to restore your backup in a timely manner to keep continuity is paramount. You can list infinite reasons why.
Why do atomic distros which are supposed to me more stable, superior to some degree immutable environments lack good backup options? You can hack things together and there are somewhat installable tools. Like timeshift or etc etc. But it seems they place a lot more emphasis on rolling back poor updates in the event than total system backups.
By default it you should have true backups then layer in rollbacks. Not the other way around. Am I missing something?
Well, kinda. I have have scripts to set up most of my system after an installation. It’s nice so that I don’t have to remember everything I’ve done. It means I can reinstall my system or install on a new system with relative ease.
Doesn’t need to be anything complex. Just having a list of packages I want installed and that I can copy into my terminal makes things so much faster.
I install or configure something every week.
In addition to doing the config, I’d have to edit a script as well, which seems like more hassle. At this point, why not go for nixOS and have just the latter part of the hassle without having to also edit config files in / ?
Instead, I run the backup command after I change something. When I want to restore, I can mount any of the last 20 backups from the borg repo and either manually revert a file or use rsync to mass overwrite.
I was thinking of using btrfs send, which would probably be even better for the purposes of recovering from disk failure, but borg file based backup takes way less space and works well so far. And I don’t have the extra effort of a declarative os or setup scripts.
Also works offline as long as I am with my NAS unlike a script that installs a list of packages from the repos.