Hi everyone, there's a question that seems to come up in GitHub Issues rather frequently: Can BackInTime be used to make a whole-system backup, including /dev, boot code, tmpfs mountpoints etc.? In my opinion, that's out of scope for backintime, and it would be a neverending game of catch-up with distributions to try and support this functionality (not to mention a nightmare for testing). I've discussed this in a recently close Issue (https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/1211), and though I'd share my arguments here, because this is a recurring topic:
The main goals/unique benefits of backintime (as I understand them) are:
1. to make the most of the powers of `rsync` in order to create incremental backups, 2. to provide a convenient and powerful graphical interface for browsing past snapshots and restoring from them, 3. and to store the backed up files in their original form and directory structure in a sane and easy-to-navigate set of folders, making it possible to restore from backup even without the backintime software itself.
This is a whole other game from complete-system backups, which need to deal with special mountpoints, device files, boot code etc. Take a look at [TimeShift](https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift), though, it may be just what you're looking for, and from what I understand, it can even be used sensibly in combination with backintime.
Cheers, Michael
Out of scope IMHO - for this imaging tools are better suited (like good old dd ;-)
I agree, but we should keep the feature request open: https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/480 because the topic comes up every once in a while. Michael On 09.09.2022 17:51, python@altfeld-im.de wrote:
Out of scope IMHO - for this imaging tools are better suited (like good old dd ;-)
Out of scope. But this is a good example of a topic that comes up from time to time. Another example is the "Is that project dead", or all the questions and problems around "permissions". So we repeat us in that cases. To prevent repetition and wasting of resources we should "answer" such questions once in form of a FAQ entry (like a predefined textblock) and then just link to that entry in each relevant Issue and close it. For a FAQ I would prefer an extra FAQ.md file (liked in the README.md of course) instead of a Wiki. The latter is harder to maintain and has its own (hidden) repo.
I also think this feature request is out of scope for Back in Time. Backing up running systems are already hard enough, and better served by filesystem snapshots. If you are backing up a system disk, this is a job for vanilla RSync, too, IMHO. Maybe later, and it’s a weak maybe, we can reconsider this, again IMHO. Cheers, Hakan
On 9 Sep 2022, at 23:25, c.buhtz@posteo.jp wrote:
Out of scope.
But this is a good example of a topic that comes up from time to time. Another example is the "Is that project dead", or all the questions and problems around "permissions".
So we repeat us in that cases. To prevent repetition and wasting of resources we should "answer" such questions once in form of a FAQ entry (like a predefined textblock) and then just link to that entry in each relevant Issue and close it.
For a FAQ I would prefer an extra FAQ.md file (liked in the README.md of course) instead of a Wiki. The latter is harder to maintain and has its own (hidden) repo. _______________________________________________ Bit-dev mailing list -- bit-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to bit-dev-leave@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/bit-dev.python.org/ Member address: hakan@bayindir.org
participants (4)
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c.buhtz＠posteo.jp -
Hakan Bayındır -
Michael Büker -
python＠altfeld-im.de