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After installing your OS (Manjaro in my case) and configuring it to your likings, which directories do you backup? (or reverse-question, which directories do you not backup?) (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Assuming you're using btrfs, just use snapshots. You can also make use of Snapper to automate the whole thing, including setting up hooks for pacman so that it automatically takes a snapshot before an update.

And for portability/reproducibility of your OS config, just backup your dotfiles:

rsync -avh --exclude={'.local/share/Trash','.Trash-1000','.cache','/[^.]*'} ~/ /mnt/backupfolder/ --delete

and package list.

And for your personal documents, just use your favorite own/cloud service provider's tool.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

/etc and ~/.config in priority

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What is typically stored in /etc ?

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

System wide configuration files

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is it possible to tell my OS that it's always going to have only 1 non-root user and relocate all the ~/.config into /etc?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

You should not do that. Things can break. Your user configurations are stored in .config and Your System configurations stored in /etc/ are used by your system. I wouldn't recommend it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Programs may read from /etc, but it's not recommended. Instead, I recommend having your .config directory stored somewhere, or preferably, have all configs in a git repository (often called dotfiles) and deploy them on systems for example with stow

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's like .config but system wide. It stands for Editable Text Configuration. Some examples is config for Sudo, Grub, X11 or SDDM.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I think that you don't need to backup /var or /tmp

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

.mozilla

One of the reasons why I will probably never install discord/slack/element for desktop, and I will use the browser version is because it's nice to have everything in one, easy to move around place.

Since I have multiple profiles I can't really take advantage of the firefox sync service.

~/Documents

Notes, poetry, other work.

~/.ssh

So I can access my servers from any machine.

~/Playables

Games and related data. Although this one is of significantly less importance, since I mainly play only ome game, binding of isaac, a roguelite.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Exclude: /dev, /proc, /sys, /tmp, /run, /mnt, /media, /lost+found, /swapfile (not a dir), ~/.cache, ~/.local/share/Trash Include: ~/.cache/paru

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

/etc /home /root /boot for me

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

why /boot ?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

habit mostly. in case i need to recover from a bad kernel update or botched grub config. i jave never needed the backups.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

When using a pre-configured Arch derivative, I really only bother to back up a few folders in /home, e.g. ~/.config, ~/Downloads, ~/Documents, ~/Pictures, ~/Music, maybe also .bashrc if I added a bunch of aliases. Everything else is easy enough to reinstall.