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Backups are good |
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April 14th, 2018 |
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Alex Schroeder wrote recently [0] about backup formats. It was an |
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important reminder that since I'd moved everything (web, gopher, |
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... is that everything?) to a raspberry pi and configured it all |
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to a working state, I hadn't backed up the system. Granted, all |
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the content I have is in git, but the system configuration itself |
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is worth quite a bit of work. |
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Evidence of this can be found easily. Tonight after I did a backup |
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(more on that in a second) I rebooted the machine and discovered |
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that bitlbee didn't start up correctly. I'm using kensanata's |
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fabulous bitlbee-mastodon plugin [1] to do all my social media |
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junk via IRC. It's awesome, but it was a headache to get working. |
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For some reason I couldn't get it to play nice with the apt |
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version of Bitlbee, so I had to compile everything from source. |
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Tonight when bitlbee stopped responding I ended up trying the |
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whole process over again, eventually giving up on apt again, and |
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reinstalling from source. (This time I properly set up systemd.) |
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Mastodon in Weechat is a minor thing, but it's evidence enough |
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that I don't want to have to rebuild the box. So, I unplugged the |
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pi for a few minutes, removed the SD card, plugged it into another |
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machine and 'dd' copied everything to an ISO. I don't think I need |
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to worry about doing that too often, thankfully, as it means |
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downtime for the box. If I ever needed to restore, I can flash |
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a new SD card, plug it in, then run update on all the git repos. |
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It will pick up pretty much everything that way, unless I do some |
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serious system additions. |
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I think I'll do the full SD backup semi-annually, maybe when |
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I change the batteries in my smoke detectors. It has a similar |
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sort of safety-maintenance feel. |
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[0] Alex Schroeder - Backup Format |
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[1] Kensanata - Bitlbee-Mastodon |
