[TriLUG] Ubuntu 18.04 Problems

[Bill Weinel via TriLUG]

On Tuesday, June 11, 2019 4:00:23 PM EDT Steve Litt via TriLUG wrote:

> I've had my own one man business since 1984, the year I bought my
> first computer. By 1989, the computer was absolutely essential to my
> business. I always backed up my data, which means information I created
> or acquired, and specifically excluded anything which I could buy
> again.

I got into the habit of backing everything up back in the old days, when we 
had CP/M, MP/M, and COBOL running on 8" floppy disk drives. Of course, a 10MB 
HD was considered a luxury back then.

> One reason for a data-only backup was that it's much easier to do,
> although with my current knowledge, setting up a shellscript to back up
> to bare metal would be pretty easy.

Yeah. I had scripts on our critical systems to automatically backup the data  
to our backup server every evening during the overnight period when the 
systems weren't being heavily used. 

The bare metal backups were usually only preformed manually when I did major 
system upgrades.  

> Another reason is that for most of my life I've considered a fresh new
> install a chance to clean out litter and ghosts from operating systemd
> past. Matter of fact, I always did it at least once a year, sort of
> like spring cleaning.

I usually did a fresh system install (with a data restore) whenever I changed 
hardware (usually done about every 3 to 4 years.) It was great for cleaning 
out the stuff no one was using anymore.  

> Another reason is it's likely the restore won't be to the same hardware
> as the backup was from. I think Clonezilla can handle that, but for me
> Clonezilla wasn't the easiest thing to work with.

Clonezilla handles that task very well. Back in the 90s, I use to do bare 
metal backups with Ghost, but I later found Clonezilla to be just as good and 
more versatile across different O/Ses... Not to mention also being open source.

> By the way, although I mention optical media,  most of my backups go
> right on the hard disk of my backup server, and only occasionally do I
> burn blu-rays and put them in my bank's safe deposit box.

We put our daily data backups on our local backup server, then had a script 
that copied the data to our off-site data backup server. Once every few weeks 
the drives would be changed out on the off-site backup server and taken home 
with someone in case both buildings happened to burn down. :^)  

Cheers,
Bill