[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
On 09/01/17 09:15, Daniel Robinson via list wrote: > Hello folks, > > I've returned to using Linux as my desktop OS after a few years away. > I'm using Ubuntu mate for simplicity (minimal). > > # Could you advise on a system backup solution? > I would like to be able to take a snapshot of my system and then when i > inevitably break it I can quickly and easily restore it. > > My system drive is currently 120GB SSD, and I have 2x 1TB HDD for backup's, > Private data is stored on another device. > > _ > > I often follow guides online to find solutions to problems. quite often > the guides don't fix my issue. I end up changing settings and running > apt-get install a lot and my system soon fills up with a great deal of > stuff that my system doesn't require and often things will break. > > # How do you keep track of applications and requisites that are > installed on your system via apt-get? > > Is there a line of commands that can undo all of these without reverting > to a system backup. > > _ > > Ports 135 - 139 > > I've noticed that although these ports are closed, they're not stealthed. > > # Should i be concerned? > > Many thanks Ah, Daniel-san - welcome back! You're obviously not a complete beginner which makes things a little easier: I'd start off by splitting your 120Gb SSD straight down the middle and giving yourself enough space for two side-by-side bare metal Linux installations for now. Partly so you can experiment with different distributions and partly so you've always got a second Linux instance left to boot and chroot into the other one to fix it in the event of "accidents". It looks like you've wisely stashed your important data elsewhere as well so while you're easing back in I'm presuming you can survive completely trashing the drive with the worst result being a reinstall? So far so good. Ubuntu Mate is as good a place to start as any, for a second option I'd recommend going with Arch Linux or a derivative (Manjara, Antergos, etc) - it's what all the cool kids are using these days. It's a sophisticated rolling release with arguably the best forums, support and community contributed package selection (I think the selection from Arch's AUR repositories at least rivals the Ubuntu PPAs by now, if not surpasses them). It took me a while to personally warm to it - I'm a Debian sort of guy at heart - and there can be more than a whiff of the old Gentoo elitism around it at times but Arch is well worth a look these days. As for your extremely sensible question about backup/restore of your bare metal testing instance you unfortunately have the usual entire plethora of *nix options to choose from - there are so many ways to do this. I'm going to ignore user-level tools such as rsync and it's many front ends/wrappers, professional backup apps and a whole bunch of other options and concentrate on the two that might actually help in your case - one "online" and one "offline". Offline is easiest so I'll do that first - this is the good old fashioned "boot from a different system and image the disk" option. It's slower, rather crude and interrupts your work flow but it's by far the most bullet-proof method. Boot from USB and use a fancy tool or just good old "dd if=/my/ssd of=/my/2TBdrive/images/$date.img bs=1M" to clone the entire drive, boot sectors, multiple OS's and all to a flat file - when things go south, just reverse the process. Not exactly granular or subtle and in my experience you usually end up skipping doing the entire disk dump that One Damn Time before running the operation that does actually trash the system but it is robust. If you have a Windows install still sitting around on that system even better - look into using a free (as in beer only) imaging tool instead such as Macrium Reflect. This way you can have a more functional OS to loiter around in for 30 minutes or so while the SSD is dumped and although Macrium doesn't have deep hooks into ext filesystems in the same way it does NTFS (so no VSS, etc) it will do incremental/differential backup/restores, will keep a nice list of jobs, can be automated, etc. Online is more fun but more complicated to implement and even more complex to use properly - you'll probably want to experiment with this quite a lot using the offline method initially 'cos this is exactly the sort of thing that will trash your system when you get it wrong. Base your install on a COW filesystem and you can snapshot your bare-metal system just like a virtual machine: LVM snapshotting doesn't count here so you'll want either BTRFS or ZFS and by that really I just mean ZFS. There's way too much material to cover here so I'd suggest googling "arch zfs" and reading around to discover more of: A: What amazing stuff it can do for you B: How much of a headache it will be to actually configure and use This is Linux, so inevitably there is a bit of a trade-off to be made here! but I promise that basing your new Linux system on a proper, modern COW instance will definitely solve your backup needs and then some. Unless you trash the bootloader or partition table of course, in which case you'll be back to restoring from image... As for maintaining package lists, most distributions have some kind of software/updates GUI application (e.g, YaST2, Synaptic, etc) that can generate or restore system states/package lists, or on Ubuntu you can do it with get/set selections on dpkg/apt, but it's often more trouble than it's worth - you'll also have to make sure PPAs and signing keys are transferred, release updates will break things, and so on. If you find yourself repeatedly reinstalling the same selections of programs again and again (because you're testing new systems a lot) you'd be better off just scripting it once properly and calling it a day. Save yourself a LOT of hassle by versioning important parts of your filesystem (which is arguably all of it - another reason to have a snapshotting COW system of course) but at minimum just install etckeeper (sudo apt install etckeeper) which will save you when a badly behaved package upgrade *doesn't* backup your original /etc configuration files before replacing them with the new defaults. It's just generally a good idea to version /etc anyway especially if you're doing heavy configuration. Ports 135-139 are of course for Microsoft stuff, but you presumably know that - as to stealthed or closed, well it's up to you I guess. You might want them to be actually open if you're planning on some legacy SMB action? It's not like you're offering up those ports to the internet at large anyway. I hope! Welcome back by the way. Cheers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq