Hello there! Here’s the thing: I got some old HDD for my Debian home server, and now that I have plenty of disk space I want to keep a backup of the OS, so that if something accidentally breaks (either SW or HW) I can quickly fix it.

now the question is: which directory should I include and which should I exclude from the backup? I use docker a lot, is there any docker-specific directory that I should back up?

  • taters@piefed.socialEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    No worries, glad I can help :)

    If you are interested, I made a tool based around rsync. It’s what I use to handle my backups plus transferring files and folders between my network connected devices.

    https://codeberg.org/taters/rTransfer

    With my tool, I’ll make the following files in a directory:

    .
├── .sync-computer-fs_01_root
├── .sync-computer-fs_02_boot
├── .sync-computer-fs_03_boot-efi
└── .sync-computer-fs_04_home

    and then enter the Rsync Backup command information into the appropriate fields of each file. I can run my command with those files and it’ll do a dry run followed by a confirmation to continue with the actual transfer.

    There’s a command option flag to reverse the transfer direction which can act as a “restore” in the case of an OS backup.

    If you happen to give it a try, any feedback would be appreciated.

    Whatever you choose to do, good luck and be sure to test everything more than you think you should. Both backups and restores. I know it’s all to easy to fuck up data transfer in any direction :)