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