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       Backups are good
       April 14th, 2018
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       Alex Schroeder wrote recently [0] about backup formats. It was an
       important reminder that since I'd moved everything (web, gopher,
       ... is that everything?) to a raspberry pi and configured it all
       to a working state, I hadn't backed up the system. Granted, all
       the content I have is in git, but the system configuration itself
       is worth quite a bit of work.
       
       Evidence of this can be found easily. Tonight after I did a backup
       (more on that in a second) I rebooted the machine and discovered
       that bitlbee didn't start up correctly. I'm using kensanata's
       fabulous bitlbee-mastodon plugin [1] to do all my social media
       junk via IRC. It's awesome, but it was a headache to get working.
       For some reason I couldn't get it to play nice with the apt
       version of Bitlbee, so I had to compile everything from source.
       Tonight when bitlbee stopped responding I ended up trying the
       whole process over again, eventually giving up on apt again, and
       reinstalling from source. (This time I properly set up systemd.)
       
       Mastodon in Weechat is a minor thing, but it's evidence enough
       that I don't want to have to rebuild the box. So, I unplugged the
       pi for a few minutes, removed the SD card, plugged it into another
       machine and 'dd' copied everything to an ISO. I don't think I need
       to worry about doing that too often, thankfully, as it means
       downtime for the box. If I ever needed to restore, I can flash
       a new SD card, plug it in, then run update on all the git repos.
       It will pick up pretty much everything that way, unless I do some
       serious system additions.
       
       I think I'll do the full SD backup semi-annually, maybe when
       I change the batteries in my smoke detectors. It has a similar
       sort of safety-maintenance feel.
       
 (TXT) [0] Alex Schroeder - Backup Format
 (HTM) [1] Kensanata - Bitlbee-Mastodon