Debian operating system

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Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

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The standard backup question (lemmy.ml)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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What is the best way to back up as much as possible of Debian 12 on my laptop to a server that has SSH available? I am currently backing up my users /home/ folder, but I would like to be able to nuke and restore the system from a backup.

I have ventoy on an external drive if that helps any.

P.S. I would like to be able to do incremental backups too.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The standard answer: don't backup the system, automate its deployment instead. Backup only data.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

Even for a home system? Not a fleet of data center servers. I am currently using rsync to backup /home/<>/ to the ssh server. I tend to make a lot of changes to the base Debian/KDE install.

[–] mipadaitu 3 points 7 months ago

Yeah, it's worth it to just start fresh. Keep your user data, nuke the rest and setup from scratch w/automation if it's extremely customized to your liking.

I personally try to use the default config as much as possible so there's not as much to set up after installing from ISO.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

There will always be gaps, but describing your machine through Ansible is worth it and can be fun if you're into that sort of thing.

The first time I set up a freshly installed Debian laptop from my existing Ansible roles was a really enjoyable moment.

Being able to establish a familiar base on a fresh system at will is a far greater power than pure config/data backups.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

What kind of changes? Package installation, removal and configuration? Use apt-mark showmanual to save list of manually installed packages, dpkg --get-selections | grep 'deinstall$' to save list of removed packages, debconf --get-selections to save debconf package settings, backup files that you edited in /etc. This should be enough for restoration, wouldn't take a long time for backup and avoid risk of filesystem inconsistency.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

You mentioned rsync, then take a look rsnapshot if you haven't yet. It is based on rsync and doing incremental backup very well.