Hi all,
For folks that weren’t able to make it yesterday, here are my slides about deduplicating backup and version control.
Stuff that didn’t make it on the slides:
For “dumb” non-versioned backups rsync/rclone are great tools. Rsync is devilishly simple but great for efficiently backing up to a drive or remote machine. Just make sure you are familiar with what the trailing slash means! The newer rclone is “rsync but cloud storage.” It’s probably what you want to use to take advantage of cheap Backblaze/Wasabi storage.
I’d admitted ignorance as to how to make system-level image backups of a Linux installation. You might want to do this if you have a development environment set up that takes a while to configure, and don’t want to risk a couple days of downtime if your drive fails. It also helps with the risk of doing dumb things like leaving important files in some folder that doesn’t get backed up with your usual backup software. I’d heard of dd, but that’s pretty low-level and a risky choice for a backup tool. After a bit of Google-research, it turns out that there are quite a number of solutions will let you create a boot disk with a nice interface for making image backups, with Clonezilla being the most popular.
Cheers,
-Art
