Hey everyone, I am a n00b Im hoping to get some opinions and advice. I am about to have my system completely set up to my liking. Its a production machine for illustration and animation. I have all my programs installed, all plugins, shortcuts customized, file structures set, various program manuals in proper locations, and personal settings for Plasma are ready to go. This is on its own drive, all production work is saved on other hard drives. So this is my perfect base system for my needs. If something happens to the drive or an unexpected failure of a kernel update or the like, and this system drive becomes unsalvageable, I would like to be able to restore it.

I recently had a system failure and timeshift seemed to do its job but on reboot i could only get to the grub command line. I looked at Kup and im not sure it would cover everything, I believe it ignores root? And im not certain a library i've had to install for certain programs or a custom settings file i have made wont end up being missed. Should i look at cloning the drive? If so what program do you folks recommend? Or is there a backup program that will do the job? Also this drive is encrypted, if that makes a difference.

Thanks in advance.

Hi!

There are a lot of possibilities to backup things. I do not recommend a full backup or full package lists. The easiest would be to backup your $HOME, including all hidden folders as the configuration goes there. In parallel do yourself a favour and write down the system wide changes you had to made. Shouldn't be that many.
If you install a package and you want to keep it, write it down. If you are installing stuff via command line, e.g. `apt install foo bar` you can check the log in /var/log/apt/. I don't know how the graphical solutions work, but it should be logged too.

For testing, set up a virtual machine, e.g. with QEMU/KVM or VirtualBox, install a fresh system, install all applications your wrote down and "restore" your homefolder. Then check missing stuff and add it to your backup.

The system itself is not worth backupping. A fresh install takes about 15 Minutes (depending on how fast your machine is) and a bitwise copy takes hours to be restored. You can, if you need, create snapshots using LVM or BTRFS which makes it possible to backup on runtime without breaking it on changing files.

As you mentioned cryptsetup: Save the header. If it gets broken you have no chance to get your data back.

Thanks for the info and response. One of the headaches i don't want to deal with again is installing Maya, which requires specific libraries to be installed and linked. That would be something I would need and I believe those don't reside in /home directory.

I stumbled apon this yesterday. Do you have any knowledge or experience with it? https://www.linux-live.org/

It seems to make a distribution from your installed system including all programs, settings, files etc.

rodgers wrote: ...which requires specific libraries to be installed ... I believe those don't reside in /home directory.

Depends on how you do the installation. Of course it is possible to install stuff on a per user base. Have a look at ~/.local/{bin,share,lib} to see if there are any installations. (These are the most common paths, but can be changed using xdg-user-dirs).

If you need such proprietary software, it is always a good idea to not install it system wide and giving it root permission if not necessary. Perhaps there is also an AppImage, Snap or Flatpak available which would bring those needed libraries in and keep it separated from the system ones.

No idea about that linux-live-thing. But as already mentioned, I wouldn't save an explicit package list and prefer meta package names to not have to update it on every package change.

Thanks again. I will take what you've said into advisement. And also poke around ~/.local/{bin,share,lib}.