MX Linux Forum

Please note:
World Backup day: https://www.worldbackupday.com/en

Also: Good stuff in the MX Manual https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MX-Li ... xum_en.pdf section 4.8.1

I always back up my data to a separate external drive....

Of course my stuff is backed up.

To me this is a "duh" answer.

I just backup my data only. I never back up my whole system. Data is the only important stuff to me. Stuff I created or stuff I know will be hard to find, when it gets abandon or discontinue. I just do this manually. Copy and Paste or drag n drop. I don't encrypt nothing either, much easier to access if things goes wrong. I backup to externals and some stuff to the cloud storage. Been backing up data since 1995 my Windows years, up to 2003 when I switch and I still backup during my Linux years as well.

gimcrack wrote: Thu Mar 27, 2025 5:46 am I just backup my data only. I never back up my whole system. Data is the only important stuff to me.

To this point, a backup means different things to different people. Some consider a backup to mean "I *must* be able to go back to *exactly* where I was at 4:43 PM yesterday!". And to others a backup means "If my machine explodes I can reinstall it from a new ISO, but my bookmarks, e-mail, and tax documents are all somewhere where I can get them again if I need them".

Personally, I maintain once-a-week, once-a-day, once-an-hour, and every-15-minutes snapshots of my daily driver ZFS datasets, and so far I've never needed to do a major salvage operation on any of them other than when I did some serious experimentation with a few Liquorix kernels. I run this on a single disk and I accept that risk, in large part because most of the stuff I work on all day is running on different systems and I spend most of my time remoted into VM and physical machines.

The important thing everyone should ask himself or herself: what is the exact monetary value you would put on losing your data today? How many dollars, euros, pesos, pounds, krona, yen, yuan, or Starbucks gift cards would you be willing to pay to get your data back from a ransomware gang?

Family photos. Love letters. A voice mail you saved to MP3. Maybe from a loved one who has passed away. Is it worth a 100 to you? Maybe 200. Maybe more.

Think about what that number is. Really think about it. Memories are priceless, yes, but most people would balk at a professional recovery service who says "we can restore your data from this failed hard drive for $1000." Think about what your "OK, do it" price is. And then consider what percentage of that you've invested into making sure that the crypto-lockers of the world can't take those files away from you. And then make sure the things you want to preserve get preserved.

Whose turn is it to backup the internet?

Like gimcrack, data backup is much more important to me. I back up to external drives and also a NAS.

I'm not so concerned if an installation of a distro borks, and this is in any case rare with other distros and does not happen with MX at all.

I have other installs on both my PC and laptop, so even if one distro dies, there are others I can run while I restore the distro that is messed up. If the whole machine dies, I have my data backup.

All my customisation files [fonts, icons, themes, conkies, wallpaper] are all part of the data that is backed up. Or I can copy over some of the stuff from another distro or the Data partition on the same machine if the machine itself is still working.

Also, once every few months, I do use gparted to copy and paste whole partitions [ie, the distro installations] to yet another external drive. This will provide a useful last resort starting point for any restoration. The partition copy may be a few months' old, but that's not a problem usually. And before I make a gparted copy, I always make sure that the distro I'm copying is working well at that point in time.

For instance, in end Feb, my test install of Arch+CosmicDE alpha simply refused to connect to the network after an update. I tried restoring various Timeshift snapshots that were fairly recent but somehow the problem was still there. So I took out my early January Gparted copy and pasted it back into the partition, and that worked. From there, I just did a system update, and this time it went well.

This is my strategy:

My data is on a separate drive within my PC. That drive has my (2TB) Dropbox folder. That folder is shared on my home network, so the data is available from different machines.
Once a day, Grsync mirrors 'home' to the data drive, so that at any one time there are three copies of 'home', two local and one in the cloud.

Chris

I am pretty much with DukeComposed on this one.. and handle my backups the same methods... + a daily timeshift.

In my experience there are two types of people when it comes to computers.
1) The person that understands how to recover from issues, and so they plan and operate their systems as such.
2) Everyone else... and these people either need or want their system to be a simple recovery - as easy as it can be.

For me... I need my systems up... period. So.. I have no problem spending the cycles and space to have as quick and automated a "recover" as I possibly can.

@MikeR Thanks for informing us about "World Backup Day"

I do Weekly Timeshift Snapshots of my 3 MX distros: Fluxbox, KDE, and Xfce. I only keep 2 of each at any one time. Thankfully, I have never had to restore my system from a Timeshift Snapshot.

I also do a monthly MX-Snapshot of my 3 distros, and then use MX-LUM to make the live, bootable flash media. I think about 4 years ago I did opt to re-install from one of these snapshots.

I run "LuckyBackup" (rsync) for my data:
docs (work, finances, browser bookmarks, SSH keys (thanks mention]DukeComposed[/mention] ), music & audio (recordings, podcasts), pics, and videos -- all add-up to about 3TB, and I have all of that backed-up across 4 separate external hard drives. I also have many of my documents backed-up to Dropbox (which I upgraded about 6 months ago to the lowest "paid" version -- 2TB, I think). Now, 2 of the external hard drives are only 1TB & 2TB each, so I am not backing-up my entire video collection to those drives. However, I do backup ALL of my data to the other 2 drives (4TB and 5TB each). Besides Dropbox (again, which has everything, except large videos), I do keep one of my backup drives "offsite"; namely, in a separate sub-basement. So, maybe not exactly offsite

Sitting on a shelf, I have 2 more 4TB drives, and one 8TB drive, waiting for me to decide exactly how to integrate them into my backup scheme. Additionally, I have a family-member who is willing to have me set-up a machine on their network, so that I can SSH into it, and I am seriously considering using that for a TRULY OFFSITE backup.

One final addendum: I was recently educated about the type of file system of my backup drives, and how that might be a determining factor, especially if I'm backing-up SSH Keys Here's the Forum link for that conversation: viewtopic.php?p=809381#p809381 Importantly, that thread mentions one of my backup-drives failing!!! So, that's the reason I am insistent on the 3-2-1 (3 copies, 2 different types of media, and at least 1 offsite) principle of backup, though I don't strictly adhere to the 2 different types of media thing. For me, I feel secure if I have at least 3 separate backup drives containing the same data, and at least one offsite.

Oh, yeah, I have also backed-up my old Windows installation, and I keep those backup files on one of my large backup hard drives. I also have this install on a separate working drive on my rig, but which is actually not even "registered" with GRUB. I just know it's there, and can get to it via my BIOS (UEFI, really; and no, it doesn't even show-up on my rEFInd GUI). This is how I backed-up the drive that has that Windows install:
Important: the "if" (input file) drive (e.g. /dev/sdb1) has to be UNMOUNTED !!!
Whereas, the "of" (output file) drive (e.g. /media/opera-dude/....) has to be MOUNTED !!!

Here's the results of the above operations:
part1.img.gz = 8.4 MiB
part2.img.gz = 10.4 GiB

Here are my sources for "dd" documentation:
https://tecadmin.net/drive-and-partitio ... d-command/ & https://linoxide.com/linux-command/linu ... -1gb-file/

EDIT:
Here's how that (working) Windows install looks on my separate hard drive: Thanks again for "World Backup Day"