---------------------------------------- Backups are good April 14th, 2018 ---------------------------------------- Alex Schroeder wrote recently [0] about backup formats. It was an important reminder that since I'd moved everything (web, gopher, ... is that everything?) to a raspberry pi and configured it all to a working state, I hadn't backed up the system. Granted, all the content I have is in git, but the system configuration itself is worth quite a bit of work. Evidence of this can be found easily. Tonight after I did a backup (more on that in a second) I rebooted the machine and discovered that bitlbee didn't start up correctly. I'm using kensanata's fabulous bitlbee-mastodon plugin [1] to do all my social media junk via IRC. It's awesome, but it was a headache to get working. For some reason I couldn't get it to play nice with the apt version of Bitlbee, so I had to compile everything from source. Tonight when bitlbee stopped responding I ended up trying the whole process over again, eventually giving up on apt again, and reinstalling from source. (This time I properly set up systemd.) Mastodon in Weechat is a minor thing, but it's evidence enough that I don't want to have to rebuild the box. So, I unplugged the pi for a few minutes, removed the SD card, plugged it into another machine and 'dd' copied everything to an ISO. I don't think I need to worry about doing that too often, thankfully, as it means downtime for the box. If I ever needed to restore, I can flash a new SD card, plug it in, then run update on all the git repos. It will pick up pretty much everything that way, unless I do some serious system additions. I think I'll do the full SD backup semi-annually, maybe when I change the batteries in my smoke detectors. It has a similar sort of safety-maintenance feel. (TXT) [0] Alex Schroeder - Backup Format (HTM) [1] Kensanata - Bitlbee-Mastodon