35
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
35 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
56868 readers
606 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
Timeshift is completely unnecessary. Fedora Atomic's rollbacking is more powerful and avoids certain issues.
You should only be backing up personal files, not OS files. The OS is replaceable, your personal files are not.
I've been backing up my OS and my personal files with borg to my NAS.
Saved me a weekend of setup and config editing once before, when my drive failed.
Or do you just remember all the config changes you did and type them out from the top of your head? And all the apps you have installed? It's over 300 apps and 100 config files for me.
The OS is tiny compared to personal files. It doesn't make sense not to back it up.
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.