Still figuring things out here. In the world, I mean.
If you don’t have the budget for on-premises backup, you almost certainly can’t afford to restore the cloud backup if anything goes wrong.
I believe egress is free on Backblaze B2.
Just make sure to test the restore procedure once in a while.
Good call on this. Curious if you have a procedure for actually doing this. I could just wipe out my system and rebuild it from the backup, but then I’m in trouble if it fails. What does a proper test of a backup actually look like?
Check out Borgbase, it’s very cheap and it’s an actual backup solution, so it offers some features you won’t get from Google drive or whatever you were considering using e.g. deduplication, recover data at different points in time and have the data be encrypted so there’s no way for them to access it.
I looked at Borgbase, but I think it will be a bit more pricey than Restic + Backblaze B2. Looks like Borgbase is $80/year for 1TB, which would be $72/year on B2 and less if I don’t use all of 1TB.
The vast majority of your system is the same as it would be if you install fresh, so you’re wasting backup space in storing data you can easily recover in other ways.
I get this, but it would be faster to restore, right? And the storage I’m going to use to store these files is relatively little compared to the overall volume of data I’m backing up. For example, I’m backing up 100GB of personal photos and home movies. Backing up the system, even though strictly not necessary, will be something like 5% of this, I think, and I’d lean toward paying another few cents every month for a faster restore.
Thanks for your thoughts on the database backups. It’s a helpful perspective!
Much simpler than my solution. I’ll look into this. Thank you!
Is your script something you can share? I’d love to see your approach. I can definitely live with a few minutes of down time in the early morning.
Had considered a device with some storage at a family member’s house, but then I’d have to maintain that, fix it if it goes down, replace it if it breaks, etc. I think I’d prefer a small monthly fee for now, even if it may work out more expensive in the long run.
Good call on the cost calculation. I’ll take another look at those factors…
If that’s the main downside to a full-system backup, I might go ahead and try it. I’ll check out Backrest too. Looks great!
Much easier than what I was trying to do. Thank you!
OK, cool. That’s helpful. Thank you!
I know in general you can just grab a docker volume and then point at it with a new container later, but I was under the impression that backing up a database in particular in this way could leave you with a database in a bad state after restoring. Fingers crossed that was just bad info. 😅
You’re right, but part of the draw of Linux is that you have more control over your OS. An immutable distro makes that a lot harder to get at as compared to non-immutable.
I feel it’s important to note for new people that, while an immutable OS is great at keeping you from breaking your system, the way it achieves this can make some things you would want to do more difficult. In Bazzite, installing software, for example, works differently than under a typical distribution.
I’ll give the example of two pieces of software that I use regularly: 1Password and Espanso. It took a fair bit of digging to figure out how to install 1Password in a way that would preserve its tight system integration… and it still doesn’t quite work — copying a password in particular contexts just doesn’t put that password on the clipboard, while it works fine in other contexts. Espanso on the other hand just won’t work under Bazzite best I can tell. I haven’t found a way to install it at all so I’m just doing without. Oh My ZSH was also quite tricky, and I got yelled at in the Bazzite Discord for doing it the wrong way. 😅
Plenty of the software I use works fine and was easy to install: FreeTube, Kdenlive, VLC, Zen Browser… unless you count the fact that the 1Password browser integration just won’t work with Zen Browser, presumably because I haven’t found the exact right combination of Flatpak permissions plus settings that will allow it to.
All this to say, I love Bazzite for gaming and use it every day, but the moment you step outside that world and want your computer to do something a little bit differently, it’s a major headache. In the context of gaming, it’s much closer to “just works” than any other distro I’ve tried.
Oh, that’s helpful. Thank you for sharing that!
Turns out this was my goof. I was trying to set up auto-login on my user account. In doing so, I set it to automatically log in to Plasma (X11) instead of Plasma (Wayland). Odd that the default option in that dropdown is not the one you’re currently using, but 🤷♂️.
What I’m now trying to figure out is why I can’t set auto-login for Plasma (Wayland). The Apply button is disabled. 🤔
Thanks to everyone who shared ideas.
HDMI switcher is an interesting idea. Will it do more than just forward on the EDID? (Hope I have that right. 😅) Will it sorta translate it and push out its own EDID?
The cable is one of the two cables that previously completed the chain between the display and computer. Could it still be a problem in spite of that?
The monitor definitely is. Like I said, it was working when connected through the soundbar. It seems to be that it isn’t reporting capabilities the same way the soundbar did when connected directly to the computer.
These “categories” are only superficially the same thing. Here’s what social/casual games and PC/console games have in common:
Here’s a couple of things that are very different:
I know I’m being reductive here, but I think the point is valid. They’re superficially the same but used for very different purposes. Putting them side-by-side on a chart like this is like comparing revenue across all car makers and determining that, because McLaren made $280 million in 2020 while Kia made $44 billion, sports cars are going away soon.
If McLaren did go away, the McLaren driver is not going to replace the McLaren with a Kia, because those are not the same thing, even though they are in the same way that a pair of scissors and a Hattori Hanzo sword are both blads, or maybe in the same way that both brass knuckles and a bazooka are weapons even though one cannot replace the other. If Baldur’s Gate 3 were never released, I wouldn’t have dumped my $60 into Fortnite skins because I’m looking for something particular out of a game. My goal isn’t just to burn $60 on anything that shows me moving pictures and maps my inputs onto those pictures. Those attributes of a video game may be what make it a video game, but they aren’t the attributes that will make me enjoy it or want to spend money on it.
If McLaren and all sports car makers go away, most of the money spent on those is not going to funnel into compact cars. It’s going to stay in people’s pockets. $280 million dollars doesn’t hold a candle to $44 billion… but someone is going to want to take that $280 million! So, someone will probably keep making sports cars… just like someone will probably keep making the games that will take the remaining ~$73 billion slice of the video games pie.
Some public companies may jump ship to chase the social/casual dollars… but these are the companies that have been trying to blur the lines anyway (think EA), so we’re really not losing much. The talent who delivered PC/console games we used to enjoy from EA have mostly moved on to other studios or to form their own studios so they can keep making what they like.
Drop will continue to operate independently
In the case of an acquisition, this sentence always has an implied “for a little while” at the end of it.
This is comforting.
Some good things to consider here. Whether or not I’ll want to upgrade will depend on how far this theoretical failure is. If storage fails, I might just replace that and restore the backup. If it’s something more significant than that and we’re 2-3 years down the line, I’ll probably look at an upgrade. If it’s less than that, I might just replace with the same to keep things simple.
I guess one other upside of the full system backup is that I could restore just the data out of it if I decide to upgrade when some hardware fails, but I don’t have the reverse flexibility (to do a full system restore) if I opt for a data-only backup.