On Sat, Mar 07, 2015 at 12:56:31AM +0100, Adam Borowski wrote: > On Fri, Mar 06, 2015 at 03:26:32PM -0700, Paul E Condon wrote: > > you should have at least two computers running Debian, and be able to > > spend a few hours or days with one of them non-functional, for the > > following reason: > > Or, use btrfs. Put your / onto a subvolume named sys-current, and have the > following cronjob: > # btrfs subv snap sys-current backups/sys-`date +%Y-%m-%d` Michael Vogt wrote some time ago apt-btrfs-snapshot as POC which hooks into apt directly to create the snapshots automatically on every system-changing interaction. [0] If I remember correctly btrfs mostly showed its ugly experimental state by being very slow which is hard to justify in an environment where everyone already complains how slow upgrades are in Debian. Hopefully its better now… The idea was to add some grub magic as well so that a user can easily pick an older snapshot if need be and then sell it big time as our transaction safe and backrollable apt. So, in case anyone is interested, head over to deity@l.d.o and lets talk business. ;) [0] https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mvo/apt-btrfs-snapshot/trunk/files > [2]. Besides separate /home (duh), you'll want to reduce the size of backups > by separating out /var/cache, make sure noatime is set, etc. I don't think /home is such a no-brainer. Sure, this is sold for cases in which a system doesn't boot anymore, but that rarely ever happens. People are much more likely to use it to revert back from Z20 to Z19, but Z20 will have converted all config files already, so Z19 is now crashing. Now combine this with someone who actually came to terms with Z20, but three weeks later discovers that feature X is broken, which he used like 2 months ago the last time, but absolutely needs it now, so that we revert now 2 months instead of painfully bisecting where it broke (last week)… So in an ideal world /home would not be separate – or at least not if you keep /etc on / as well – but your data. Whatever that is… 'What do you mean "incompatible savefile"? That was the run of my life!' (insert databases, mails, websites and vdr record timers here) That is hardly a btrfs problem per se, but if you are selling it as the way to end all (system) backups, users will run into it sooner or later and be very disappointed – and backups shouldn't be disappointing… Best regards David Kalnischkies
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