Hello there! Here’s the thing: I got some old HDD for my Debian home server, and now that I have plenty of disk space I want to keep a backup of the OS, so that if something accidentally breaks (either SW or HW) I can quickly fix it.

now the question is: which directory should I include and which should I exclude from the backup? I use docker a lot, is there any docker-specific directory that I should back up?

  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
    32·
    1 day ago

    Why? I have a hard time imagine a use case where restoring the OS itself would be appropriate.

    I can imagine restoring data, obviously, and services running with their personalization … but the OS is something generic that should be discarded at whim IMHO. You probably chance few basic configuration of some services and most likely that’s stored in /etc but even then 99% is default.

    You can identify what you modified via shell history, e.g. history | grep /etc and potentially save them or you can also use find /etc -type f -newerXY with a date later than the OS installation and you should find what you modified. That’s probably just a few files.

    If you do back up anything beyond /home (which should be on another partition or even disk than the OS anyway) you’ll most likely save garbage like /dev that might actually hinder your ability to restore.

    So… sure, image the OS if you actually have a good reason for it but unless you work on archiving and restoring legacy hardware for a museum then I doubt you do need that.