[02:21] <lotuspsychj3> good morning
[07:52] <Bashing-om> !ping
[07:52] <ubottu> pong!
[19:45] <sem> Pow
[19:45] <sem> I have a discussion topic about Ubuntu:
[19:45] <sem> Say somebody wanted really easy system backups...
[19:46] <sem> As in, I can migrate between devices with a single click easy
[19:46] <sem> How would you make that
[19:47] <Eickmeyer> Not single-click, but really close: clonezilla.
[19:48] <ravage> and if you like clicking try rescuezilla
[19:49] <ravage> but I prefer the text mode style
[19:49] <sem> Clonezilla is a live-cd right? Can you make automatic backups with it somehow ?
[19:50] <ravage> no. and a full-backup from a running system is not the best idea anyway
[19:51] <ravage> you should do seperate backups of /home and the rest of the system
[19:52] <ravage> i use borg backup for my home backups and a seprate one for the rest. so / except home. that usually is enough to restore the system to a previous state. but does not save a bootable state of course
[19:52] <ravage> you should have a one-time full backup with clonezilla for that. and then you can always restore filesystem level backups on top of that when needed
[19:53] <sem> From a user experience perspective, my goal is the experience of completely automated backups, but downtime is ok if necessary. Is that possible with btrfs?
[19:53] <ravage> btrfs support snapshots
[19:53] <ravage> but a snapshot is not a backup
[19:54] <sem> ravage: can you run that root borg backup while it's running? Or does it need to be done from a live cd
[19:54] <ravage> there are backup tools that use btrfs snapshots for backups
[19:55] <ravage> i backup my / while the system is runnning yes.
[19:55] <sem> Ok cool
[19:55] <ravage> but i do not run any database server for example on my desktop
[19:55] <sem> Yeah
[19:55] <ravage> databases dont like to be backuped at runtime
[19:55] <ravage> and as i said that backup only saves files. not partitions or bootloaders
[19:56] <sem> I'm imagining an experience like with a phone
[19:57] <ravage> that experience is overrated too. so many apps do not get backuped completely
[19:57] <sem> You get the new phone, and at some point you say "restore from backup" and it just fetches (most of) your files and apps from a backup 
[19:57] <sem> It's ok that it's not perfect with apps
[19:57] <ravage> if you just need your files then all you need is /home
[19:58] <sem> The helpful thing is it restores most of your apps and settings and all of your files 
[19:58] <sem> It's ok that it's not perfect
[19:59] <ravage> if you are ok with some work to setup a backup destination ssh borg is great. restic is an alternative
[20:00] <ravage> https://vorta.borgbase.com/ is a nice GUI for borg
[20:01] <sem> Ooh I'll check it out
[20:01] <sem> I use restic with a rest server for my nextcloud backup, but I'm afraid to make it automatic
[20:02] <sem> I feel like I need to be there just in case something doesn't go right
[20:02] <ravage> i switched to the AIO docker image of nextcloud
[20:02] <ravage> im not a big docker fan
[20:02] <ravage> but it just works
[20:02] <ravage> and does borg backups automatically
[20:02] <sem> I would do that if I had a stronger server than a rpi4
[20:03] <ravage> but if you just add a mysql and possibily postgres dump before you start your borg or restic backup you should be fine
[20:03] <ravage> i would set that up to a remote storage in a cron
[20:03] <sem> I'm using nextcloudpi which has some kind of backup built in, but I don't think it uses de-duplication so I use restic on that as well
[20:04] <ravage> never tried that on the pi
[20:04] <ravage> i tested the nextcloud snap
[20:04] <ravage> was not too bad 🙂
[20:04] <sem> I have a nice script that automatically 1. Puts it in maintenance mode
[20:04] <Eickmeyer> I use the nextcloud snap in production. Works great.
[20:05] <sem> 2. Dumps mariadb. 3. Backs up the database, nextcloud directory, and data. 4. Takes it out of maintenance mode
[20:05] <ravage> with nexcloud everything that handles updates and backups for me is great
[20:05] <ravage> it always got messy for me on bigger system updates
[20:06] <sem> But it doesn't have any kind of error handling or logging so I can't just run it in cron
[20:06] <ravage> you could check the timestamps of that backup and some rough size checks maybe
[20:06] <ravage> and send you a notification if something looks off
[20:07] <ravage> or you look at that script and extend it
[20:07] <sem> I don't think I'm clever enough to write that but it's a nice idea
[20:10] <sem> But I'm about to replace an old family computer with a raspberry pi, and hoping to set up a backup system where it backs up over the LAN automatically, and it is easy to test the restore function.
[20:11] <sem> I'll look at the vorta software to see if it can do that
[23:11] <sem> Pika also uses borg
[23:17] <sem> The Borg version of resorting from backup is to copy the home directory to the new system
[23:17] <sem> But this still isn't great for ux because the user has to know how to create a user with that name, chown all the files for a start
[23:18] <sem> Not hard for a sysadmin or power user but miles away from the ez backup restore of phones
[23:35] <sem> This quote from YouTube: TimeMachine is one of the most important reasons I still use OSX/MacOS. It has saved me twice, once restoring from to a completely replaced drive. Not just my files but my full OS including all settings for printers, wifi and everything else. It is simply brilliant, I really don't understand why Windows and Linux don't have something similar. It is from 2007, so it completely baffles me that no other OS has been able to create 
[23:35] <sem> something similar in 17 years...
[23:36] <daftykins> if you NFS mounted a user's /home from a NAS, the Pi itself would be irrelevant and you could just keep overwriting the microSD card to recover (aside from US updates)