nmglug

Download

nmglug@lists.nmglug.org

January 2023

2 participants
2 discussions

Mtg Thurs, 02/02/23 1730 MST
by Ted Pomeroy 31 Jan '23

31 Jan '23

NMGLUGers, Our webpage shows that this week is a "virtual" week. I will try to attend and can report on a little work I did to sort our six laptops and what success I had with old and very old laptops. I will also be using a laptop, not my desktop unit this week, to test my choice of another older, but very useful machine. I am running LinuxMint 21.1. This is a "user friendly" edition, and it is just that. I have two or three users on this OS and one or two with Ubuntu 22.04. I try to share the freedom. Alas I am also helping at the Luisa Sr. Ctr. and another OS is the City's choice there. I answer basic and not so basic questions. For those who use a cellphone for email and then want to print it can be a bit challenging to master the intricacies of permissions and tracking by the email providers. Thank you, Ted P.

2 1

Recommendations for rsync backup subsequent to Debian release upgrade
by Tom Ashcraft 31 Dec '22

31 Dec '22

Happy New Year nmglugers, Yesterday I finally got around to doing a 'release upgrade' on the laptop I most often use (hence the reluctance and tardiness; HP-Notebook running Debian 10 Buster KDE to Debian 11 Bullseye KDE.) This performed "in-place" versus my more traditional "nuke-n-pave" procedure (ref DebianUpgrade https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUpgrade?highlight=%28upgrade%29) In preparation, and per said ref recommendations among others, I also performed a full-system rsync backup onto an external spinning USB drive which had/has relatively modest extra space remaining. I used this command: sudo rsync -aAXv --delete --exclude=/dev/* --exclude=/proc/* --exclude=/sys/* --exclude=/tmp/* --exclude=/run/* --exclude=/mnt/* --exclude=/media/* --exclude="swapfile" --exclude="lost+found" --exclude=".cache" --exclude="Downloads" --exclude=".VirtualBoxVMs" --exclude=".ecryptfs" / /media/toma/8ef25fac-72e6-49dd-9bda-b58df57ef8d9/Deb10KDEhpnb I know I could bunch all those '--excludes' between braces, etc., but I'm lazy, and despite wading through the man page now and then I can never remember or fully comprehend all the ins and outs of rsync. So on the rare occasions that I actually bother to do a full backup, I just copy and paste the above in a text console with minimal modifications (usually only the source and destination specifications). I got the exact command string from some old notes I originally made mostly from an Average Linux User article and watching some YouTube videos. So in theory I now have what should be a sufficiently functional full-system and home directory copy with which to restore the entire, but now superceded, Debian 10 installation--if for some reason that should have become, or should in the future become, desirable. That now seems relatively unlikely and undesirable as, at least at present, everything I've checked in the upgraded Debian 11 appears to be present and working properly. And now that I have the new upgrade, it seems reasonable--especially since tomorrow is New Year's Eve and everything--that I should promptly do another rsync system backup to protect my new investment of time and effort and also the new data related to and stored in the now substantially modified system. So I was thinking that I would just change the name of the destination directory in the external USB drive to reflect the fact that it would now be a Debian 11 backup as opposed to a Debian 10 backup, and do the same rsync command above, again. The size of the net delta between the Debian 10 and 11 backups should be relatively small, right? But I'm also wondering about things like the flags --delete and --exclude=".cache" and --exclude ".ecryptfs". And maybe I should review -aAXv... I want to "strike while the iron is hot" before attrition and the demands of the new year destroy my focus and resolve. But I also want to err on the side of caution. So my remaining questions are: 1) am I about to do anything stupid?; and, 2) does anybody have any thoughts or suggestions about rsync and backups that I should be aware of or might benefit from? Thanks, Tom

1 0