Backup applications like luckyBackup

[Richard]

Yes, by changing it to save and never delete,
by unchecking the above parameter.

IMHO, that is the point of the problem that some have had when for various reasons the Source has changed and when LB is run again everything that doesn't exist on Source is deleted from the target!!

So, yes, I have happily used Lucky Backup without that Delete parameter active, which ensures that everything backed will still exist in my backup folder.

My personal opinion is that the parameter to Delete from backup should not be active by default. I learned the hard way several years ago.

Other than that it works fine for me. Imagine that for users who don't mess around with the system files and move/change HDDs probably don't have any problem.

[m_pav]

I've used it for years without fault.
My most important files are sync'd with an online account, there are really only a handful of them. The remainder are kept in check using Luckybackup, but I install and configure bleachbit, then use an option available in Luckybackup to run bleachbit prior to backing up so I don't backup thousands of crap files from my browser cache and I don't end up keeping screeds of ISO images and VM images from past experiments, so for me, the option to remove files from the destination drive is very, very useful.

Most people either backup too much, or they backup too little, if at all. I've set up many businesses and individuals with daily/weekly or monthly scheduled backups that purposefully do not backup any temporary files, cache locations and restrict backups of the likes of their downloads folder and trash. Keeping backups of these thousands of unnecessary files compound the time it takes for each backup to complete and waste local and network space and bandwidth and they easily mount up into the hundreds of thousands and even into the millions if not kept in check.

Backups need to be carefully planned and exclusions are just as important as inclusions. Know your file system well, know what is important and what is superfluous. In your backups, retain only the good and necessary files, trash the rest, unless you're interested in running on-going forensic analysis, then and only then, keep everything.

It's OK if you want to keep everything, that's your choice, but I'd hate to be the one that has to trawl through hundreds of thousands of junk files to find the gems you need.

N.B. My home folder backup for my daily driver is over 600GB.

[finickyrelic]

I've used it for years without fault.
My most important files are sync'd with an online account, there are really only a handful of them. The remainder are kept in check using Luckybackup, but I install and configure bleachbit, then use an option available in Luckybackup to run bleachbit prior to backing up so I don't backup thousands of crap files from my browser cache and I don't end up keeping screeds of ISO images and VM images from past experiments, so for me, the option to remove files from the destination drive is very, very useful.

Most people either backup too much, or they backup too little, if at all. I've set up many businesses and individuals with daily/weekly or monthly scheduled backups that purposefully do not backup any temporary files, cache locations and restrict backups of the likes of their downloads folder and trash. Keeping backups of these thousands of unnecessary files compound the time it takes for each backup to complete and waste local and network space and bandwidth and they easily mount up into the hundreds of thousands and even into the millions if not kept in check.

Backups need to be carefully planned and exclusions are just as important as inclusions. Know your file system well, know what is important and what is superfluous. In your backups, retain only the good and necessary files, trash the rest, unless you're interested in running on-going forensic analysis, then and only then, keep everything.

It's OK if you want to keep everything, that's your choice, but I'd hate to be the one that has to trawl through hundreds of thousands of junk files to find the gems you need.

N.B. My home folder backup for my daily driver is over 600GB.

Thank you for providing insight into this. Being new to Linux in general, I don't fully understand the logic behind the file system hierarchy. While some things like /mnt and /media are easy to understand, I have never been able to grasp the differences between directories that seem redundant at first glance. For example, directories within /usr seem to also be in /usr/local and then I've also got a ~/.local directory as well.

That said, I do understand that most of the data that I would care to backup lives in /home. So, besides the obvious directories like ~/Downloads, what should I be thinking about excluding so as to prevent backing up unnecessary files such as browser cache?

[entropyfoe]

Richard,

Thanks for your experience.

My personal opinion is that the parameter to Delete from backup should not be active by default. I learned the hard way several years ago.

I never noticed that check box, so that was probably what was happening. I will look at LB again.
I agree, that is a dangerous option to have in back-up software turned on by default.

That said, I have adopted Grsync, in the repos, and works well with what I find to be a simple interface.

[m_pav]

No need to backup anything other than the contents of your <login name> home folder, the rest can be reinstalled in less than 10 minutes on most semi-current machines, less if you have a SSD.

MX has a cleanup tool, that's a start, but it won't clear out browser temp files, you'll need another tool for that. There's a few around and we used to ship with bleachbit preloaded, but people were doing some dumb things with it and claiming MX was rubbish when in reality, PEBCAK was more accurate.

If you want to use bleachbit, make sane choices like selecting only the things that appear to be junk, not everything and operate it only as a user, not as root. As a user, you will have limited access to system files, that is a good thing, don't mess with what you don't understand.


Here's a simple and safe selection list
Under Deep scan
.DS_Store
Backup Files - these are backups of old configs, usually given the suffix .bak. Rarely seen in your /home folder
Temporary Files - stands to reason
Thumbs Database - delete only if you don't want to refresh the previews database of items stored in your home folder

Firefox (most browsers will have a similar selection)
Cache - this is where things get out of hand, clean often
Cookies - your choice if you want to keep them or not, can cause troubles with saved passwords
Crash Reports - delete
DOM Storage - Delete
What remains is up to you, but these are the essentials for browsers

Libreoffice - only clean the cache, history is a good feature if you use LO as your daily driver

System - mostly root access only, but you can clean the cache, clipboard, recent documents list and trash

Thumbnails - as per the thumbs database, this removes the miniature images that are displayed as thumbnails.

Once you set these in Bleachbit, you can set Luckybackup to run it ahead of the actual backup, which will only work on your data stored in your home using the selections you last made using the GUI, not on the system. Bleachbit runs in headless mode when called by luckybackup, meaning, no GUI.

As for the Linux filesystem, there are literally thousands of internat pages on it. The one on the OpenSource site is good and there's an old project called LSB which seeks to standardise the filesysten heirarchy, it's still alive but no longer needed. They sought to make everything knowable through familiarity so vendors could make drivers for Linux. It didn't help much, but Epson still hold fast to it and are probably to only manufacturer left that does.

[Richard]

Thanks @m_pav and @entropyfoe,
All good ideas.

I only use Lucky Backup to backup my /media/DATA folder.

I backup up several configs from ~/.config to the DATA folder
And some apps from external repos such as LibreOffice, Doublecmd, etc.
whether from MX or app sites.

I also backup my original /etc/skel and my current modified one
from time to time to /DATA.

LB for me is only for data, app debs, configs and anything that seems important.
MX Snapshot for system.

[asqwerth]

Thanks @m_pav and @entropyfoe,
All good ideas.

I only use Lucky Backup to backup my /media/DATA folder.

I backup up several configs from ~/.config to the DATA folder
And some apps from external repos such as LibreOffice, Doublecmd, etc.
whether from MX or app sites.

I also backup my original /etc/skel and my current modified one
from time to time to /DATA.

LB for me is only for data, app debs, configs and anything that seems important.
MX Snapshot for system.

Same usage exactly!

I would add that the default "delete" setting did not catch me out because I actually visited the LB website and poured through their manual/instructions to understand what and how the program was backing up/syncing stuff.

I found out there are a few different "backup" styles possible in LB:

1) the one-way backup option where anything new in source is added to the target (backup) but where target may continue to store previously-backed up files that no longer exist in source (Richard's preferred wa,y and what I do with my NAS backup of my Data partition),
2) the option to have the target always mirror the source (what I do with my external USB drive backup of my Data partition)
3) the option to compare both source and target and have some sort of 2-way merge of both. I've never used this but it's a strange one. If I understand it correctly, if you deleted file X in source but it was still in the target, after the backup/merge process, both source and target will have file X.

[sunrat]

I use Syncthing to mirror 2 computers in different rooms so I have the same data on both although it's not limited to local sync. Add file to one, quickly adds to another, delete on one it deletes on the other when Syncthing is running. I usually don't run it constantly so it just syncs when I want it to, but can be configured to run as a daemon at boot if you wish it to always run. Can sync multiple computers on Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, Solaris and OpenBSD, or Android. It's backup in the sense of protection against hardware failure, but I also rsync all the data to an external HDD as well.
It takes a small amount of setting up at first and runs a browser interface where most configuration can be done simply.
Available in Debian repo but I found the Syncthing repo had better version last I tried.
https://syncthing.net/

[Yellowhoney]

I use Syncthing to mirror 2 computers in different rooms so I have the same data on both although it's not limited to local sync. Add file to one, quickly adds to another, delete on one it deletes on the other when Syncthing is running. I usually don't run it constantly so it just syncs when I want it to, but can be configured to run as a daemon at boot if you wish it to always run. Can sync multiple computers on Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, Solaris and OpenBSD, or Android. It's backup in the sense of protection against hardware failure, but I also rsync all the data to an external HDD as well.
It takes a small amount of setting up at first and runs a browser interface where most configuration can be done simply.
Available in Debian repo but I found the Syncthing repo had better version last I tried.
https://syncthing.net/

how do you set it up to sync over the network MX > other
i am guessing must be firewall or some thing

Windows 10 > windows 10 = work over network and internet
MX > windows 10 = only work over internet

[JayM]

@Yellowhoney: That sounds like a samba issue. Can you connect to the Win10 shared directory in Thunar? (Also you should start a new topic for your help request rather than hijacking someone else's older one, especially if you need help with samba which would be off-topic in this thread..)