Two introductory things: * Happy Thanksgiving to all!
* I am not very good about doing regular backups, or backing up everything that should be backed up I'm writing this to maybe spark a discussion which might include links to sources that provide the answers I'm looking for (for which I'm looking ;-). To me, I don't care too much or at all what software does my backups, I would like to have a convenient almost one button (one cron job) method to do my backups, and then I care more about how the backups are organized / formatted, with the idea (among others) that a variety of software could write to or read from the backups as organized. I guess the exception to not caring about the software is that I do recognize that programs that use rsync are useful at times, especially when the backup is remote. (But using rsync could be an option of any backup program, not just, for example, one like rdiff, which, iiuc, is written specifically to (always?) use rsync.) Is there any standard for the organization of backed-up files? Maybe even a default standard (something that several backup programs use)? I'm going to elaborate -- I mean things like the naming of files, the naming of directories of files, compression of files (or tarring), encryption of files, whether perhaps they are stored as diffs, etc. I want to elaborate further, but I don't know how best to do that -- let me describe (in probably too long a writeup) how I'd like my backup files to be stored. First of all, I want to distinguish between backups of the system and backups of user data (and sort of an inbetween one, backups of user / system configuration data). Next, let me say that I personally don't care too much about having a backup to do a bare metal reinstall of my system, I am much more interested in what I consider my "user data" -- files that I've created or collected (whether they be programs, source code, text files, spreadsheets, photos, sketches, videos, audios, ...). If I personally have a system "occurrence" that requires a bare metal reinstall, I am more likely to install a more recent system from scratch. For example, my "daily driver" is a Debian Wheezy system -- if it dies, I will probably install the latest Debian (Buster) and then restore my user data, rather than restoring the Debian Wheezy system. (There could be exceptions or reasons not to do it that way -- I hear people complaining about systemd stuff, and having problems (either real problems of systemd or just new approaches that are required that a user is not yet familiar with), so if I found a lot of problems I might go back to Wheezy (or something inbetween, like Jessie). If I did go back to Wheezy, my first thought is that I'd reinstall Wheezy from scratch, then consider adding the user / system configuration files (the stuff in /etc and /home/<username./.*) -- that would probably be on a selective basis as I found things that weren't working as I desired after the "from scratch" install. Anyway, another thought occurred to me as I write this -- maybe what's needed (maybe what I would like to have) is a very easy to read and modify backup configuration file, that many backup programs could read, write, and utilize. In it, I could specify, by directory | filename | (maybe) partition, which files to backup, how often to back them up, where to store them (and organize them), whether to encrypt them, tar them, compress them, store them as diffs (I forget the right terminology, so let me just say forward or reverse deltas), how to name new directories | files that might be created, whether to use the rsync type transmission algorithm, and maybe other things that don't come to mind atm. Then, knowing how the backup is stored, I'd have the freedom (and knowledge) to restore anything that I needed to restore -- a single file from yesterday, last week, or wheneve; all my user files; all my encrypted files, and even a bare metal complete reinstall (including or not including my user data). Of course, I'd like the backup program to handle at least some of those restorations, but I'd also like the freedom to use other OS (CLI?) tools to go into the structure of the backedup files and do whatever I wanted / needed to do. So, maybe rather then elaborating any further, I'll just ask if anything like a "standard" backingup configuration file exists, or a standard organization of backups, or if several such candidates exist, or if neither of the above, does anyone else see the advantage of such an approach? (One advantage that I hope I've alluded to but maybe not explicitly stated is that, if one backup program disappears, other backup programs could continue to work with the "standard" backingup configuration file and the standard (or the user customized) organization of the backed up files. (I won't go much into organization of the files, but one such "choice" to be made is how subsequent backups are organized in directories, for example, each new backup in a new directory, with the same basic name, but with a suffix to indicate the date (and time?) when that backup was made. (And, are backups older than a certain time frame deleted, or compressed, or moved to another storage medium?))
