Brainstorming, preparing for new laptop

[jglen490]

Making a rational decision and acting on it is never bad.

Decisions like these are not life or death, and can certainly be re-addressed, anytime, if desired. I have my choices, GG has his.

[jglen490]

I'm sure GG will have something more meaningful to add about backups, but I use rsync for external backups. Those backups are not compressed, so it's easy to pick and choose what to bring back.

As an example, if I'm backing up ALL of my /home to my external drive that is labelled "Backup1", this is what I do:

sudo rsync -auv /home /media/john/Backup1

You could further specify /home to be only /home/<username>/<.someconfig>

[GreyGeek]

Since you are on EXT4 and not BTRFS jglen490's advice is the best there is on backing up your home account. It is certainly better than using TimeShift.

DYKK, I was born and raised in Denver and learned to drive on ice and snow. Even at 80 I love cold weather. I can always put on more clothing if I get cold, but in warmer climes I am limited as to what I can take off without depending on AC. My father-in-law regaled us with stories about how, as a kid, he and his family slept out in the park a couple blocks from his home in North Platte, Ne, because it was too hot to sleep indoors. He said the park was filled with his neighbors. During that heat waves in 1935 and 1936 the aged and affirmed died in huge numbers.

BTW, don't worry about Texas. It is turning Blue faster than most people realize. So are most Southern states as Northern snowbirds leave the cold weather, and the political environment their votes helped create, and move South to keep warm and continue voting they way they always have. Nebraka's current conservative govenor will probably be the last, or next to the last, conservative govenor to win that title in Nebraska. The populations in Lincoln and Omaha combined outnumber the number of folks living in the rest of the state, where most conservative voters live, and both cities have become blue. I'm sad to see it happen, but folks are entitled to get what they vote for.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Thanks, jglen490. I used rsync years ago, and tar before that, but have gotten used to--and like--the plain old copying method, which works whether I'm GUI or CLI. I know there are some system files I want to keep for reference, but I think I've accounted for those now, as well as all my own stuff. I guess we'll find out!

[jglen490]

No worries!

rsync is similar to just copying a file, but to the best of my knowledge is intended to preserve attributes that might be changed by a simple copy command. In my use case it backs up all the GB specified while go watch a football game, or maybe even something useful

[DoYouKubuntu]

Just wondering what happened to the rest of this thread... I know it had gone wildly off-topic, but since I'm the OP and I was participating AND I love thread-drift, it wasn't a problem--for me. What happened?

[Snowhog]

I moved those post as, yes, 'gone wildly off-topic'.

Those posts, now in The Water Cooler forum titled Just Talking.

[DoYouKubuntu]

I moved those post as, yes, 'gone wildly off-topic'.

Those posts, now in The Water Cooler forum titled Just Talking.

Okay, thanks for the explanation SH. It took me by surprise, as I've never felt censored here for talking about 'taboo' topics, like politics, so I couldn't imagine that was it. Yes, it had gone wildly off-topic, but I thought there was still some discussion mixed in about the actual topic.

[Snowhog]

Not censoring you by taking the action I did. It's to keep Thread content 'relevant'. Nothing more. If I were censoring you, I may have simply removed those posts.

[GreyGeek]

Yup, no censorship on this forum. I've been on it since Feb of 2009 and I've posted several highly political msgs and have never been censored. Those discussions were always polite and the sides wererespectful of each other, which makes a HUGE difference. The 1st Amendment is alive and well on this forum.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Exactly, GG. We joined within weeks of each other, and I've never in any way felt censored. THAT is why I was so shocked, because I couldn't imagine we'd been censored...but I also couldn't imagine deleting posts just because of thread-drift. I'm sure I've said many times on this forum that I personally *LOVE* thread-drift, because it more closely replicates *real* conversations. Think if you're at a party or having dinner with friends. You start out talking about one thing, but then it branches off to something else, which spawns something else, and so on and so on. When that happens online, it feels natural. When I was a mod [elsewhere] I didn't delete/move replies that had strayed, unless they blatantly broke a TOS rule, like making personal insults or threats.

Well, guess what? We're doing it again!!!

So back to the original topic: I'm still typing on *my* current laptop. Long story, but I planned on sending it out this morning but didn't. I'm waiting to hear back from S76 before I send it. With the extra time, I've checked, double-checked, and triple-checked that I haven't skipped backing up anything important.

Recently, just to see how it would work if I needed to use it, I tried downloading a directory I'd saved on Amazon Drive. To my surprise, it offered a zipped file as the download. I'm not exactly sure how I THOUGHT it would work, but that definitely wasn't it! So restoring from Amazon will be a last-ditch event, like if all the hard drives I've made backups on simultaneously fail....

[GreyGeek]

I used to use a Google G drive as a backup (free up to 15GB, IIRC) and used it to pass files to friends and families. When ever someone selected a group of files to download that group was always combined into a zip file, and I assumed it was to minimze the time to download in order to free up the server more quickly. But, that's just a guess.

[DoYouKubuntu]

It's just funny with Amazon Drive that it *accepts* directories as uploads, but doesn't *download* them that way. To me it seems like if it works in one direction, it should work in the opposite direction, too.

It's not a big deal, just not what I expected. Hopefully, I'll never NEED to rely on anything I've backed up there, but you never know!

[GreyGeek]

Well, I solved that problem by saying goodbye to Google. Strangely, I got a popup from Google mail this morning claiming "We haven't seen you in over six months! Is something wrong?" *eyeroll*

I switched to MEGA for a while, and it has a nice interface. IIRC, you can store up to 50GB free of charge. With the MEGA Dolphin addon if you assign a folder to MEGA what you drop into that folder gets uploaded to MEGA. What you delete gets deleted from MEGA. I tried that feature for a while but I didn't want to clutter up my drives with that stored data so I just used their Web service to upload, download and maintain my remote storage. After using BTRFS for a while I releazed that I didn't need cloud storage so I deleted my account.

[DoYouKubuntu]

I had a paid Dropbox account for years; they--SHOCKINGLY--actually had a native Linux client!! I dumped it a year or two ago because of an IDIOTIC limitation on file names. I don't remember the names right now, but I can easily look them up. They're STANDARD names you'd find on a windows system, like thumbs.db and something.ini. Attempting to upload a directory containing files with those names would cause the upload to fail. When I contacted support, they said, oh, just delete or rename those files before you back them up! I said, YOU'RE KIDDING, right?! Can you imagine plodding through thousands of directories, spread across multiple computers, to DELETE (like you don't need it) or RENAME (like it will function correctly with a different name) THOUSANDS of files?! Well, I couldn't, so I said goodbye.

Since I already had a [free] Google Drive with little space, I upgraded it to a paid account. Then one day I was browsing my Amazon Prime benefits, which I rarely do--but should--and found something amazing. Even though I've been using Amazon Photos for eons, which I have set to automatically upload new photos, I had not put two and two together until I read my benefits. AP allows unlimited storage of images at FULL resolution, meaning the zillions of photos I've taken with my Nikon cameras are welcome there, with no limit. Once I did some rough in-my-head calculations, I realized that my non-image backup needs would fit easily in their small paid account of 100GB. So I paid for that, and that's how I ended up using AD for backups. (Which reminds me, I need to cancel the paid G account.)

I used to use my own domains for backups, but got in trouble once--years ago, I don't even remember the hosting company now--because you're not supposed to do that. Or at least with THEM. If I went back to doing that, I wouldn't need to pay anyone [anything extra, I'm already paying for hosting]. I just feel safer knowing that my files are stored somewhere that isn't HERE, just in case, you know?