Hi! A friend just recommended the backup tool that comes with Ubuntu. I took a look at it and was wondering what you guys include and exclude from the backups. I just installed wire guard VPN and but the config file in the etc/wireguard folder, where it belongs. I would have to include this folder as well if I want to keep my configs. And I guess many programs do the same, so how do you know what to include, so you can just revert to the last backup if something breaks or you get a new machine? Maybe that is a stupid question, but it was going through my head for some time now. Thanks a lot!
If you don’t know, or aren’t sure. Backup everything if you have the space. Once you’ve hit a couple of disaster scenarios, it will become apparent what stuff is really important.
Obviously, the stuff you can’t recreate otherwise is most important. But apart from that, even the stuff you can recreate from other sources might be worth backing up because of time savings. E.g. faster to restore from backup than to recreate.
Yup. Step 1 is backup everything. Step 2 is maybe improve your reproducibility and then remove the things that can be reproduced from the backups.
Great advice. For me, it’s the irreplaceable data first, and then stuff like configs and credentials/keys.
My borg-backup (to my NAS) config is “My Documents” type files, /etc stuff I’m likely to customise, and home stuff except the stuff like “*Cache”, “*Storage”, assets/icons/history/recent/blah. It’s tedious to fine-tune, but I figure too much is infinitely better than too little.
If I want to be able to do an image-based restore, then I’d use a different tool. But life’s too short for that.
Also, while it may be fairly easy to recreate the OS/Application install from scratch that is generally small potatoes storage wise compared to you music/movies/photos etc that you for sure want to back up.