alt Hacker News The novice said: "I will save my working files, but not my system and application files, as they can be always be reinstalled from their distribution disks."
The master made no reply.
The next day, the novice's disk crashed. Three days later, the novice was still reinstalling software.
Replies
My strategy for Gentoo, more or less:
/etc/ - all modified configuration files, including
/etc/portage/ - make.conf, package configuration (package.accept_keywords, package.use, and friends)
/var/lib/portage/ - world, and world sets. basically everything portage needs to rebuild the system
/var/db/repos/ - notably local and/or self-owned package repos
/home/<username>/ - no explanation needed
/root/ - no explanation needed
This should contain enough to pretty much rebuild a Gentoo system from a clean downloadable Stage onwards without (too much) intervention.
It's not guaranteed to be bit identical (the why of it is a can of worms), but it's identical enough for all practical purposes.
If your NixOS setup is not of hello-world kind, you typically have sops in it (or another secret management tool) and want to backup your age keys as well. They're necessarily separated from the main config tree so they don't end up leaking to the globally accessible nix store, and in the most typical case they're located in a 600 file outside the git repo. Forgetting to back it up is a classic NixOS gotcha and also a generalized version of this koan.
If bare metal recovery takes shorter time than reinstalling, then you should make bare metal backups. When bare metal updates, so should your backups.
If you're using virtual machines, make sure to backup the hypervisor config and setup as well. You never know which part of the infrastructure starts to fail first.
I feel that this made more sense in 1997. Especially in the context of Windows Server and whatever people ran on it.
You've missed the point. It doesn't matter that you can rebuild the system exactly, the example in question had little to do with how accurate the restores were, it had to do with the time to reinstall.
I too can entirely rebuild many systems simple from kickstarting a new one and applying an ansible playbook. Do I want to? No, that's too slow, and I might be doing this operation for tens or hundreds of systems.
We have multiple levels of backups. We use veeam for VM and physical backups of the entire system to a disk store that's also shipped off-site to an immutable store, but we also run an older system based on rsync which rsyncs the system to directory on a server (sans some data directories) that uses snapshots to keep space usage minimal for the purpose.
In many cases, if we want to restore we can literally just rsync data back to the host, whether one or a few files or most of the system.
I can restore many types of failures within seconds or single digit minutes at most, and the time required is mostly unattended time. Time to restore is often an important and overlooked metric, until you've been bitten by it and realized that an hour or more of work from a person to restore something doesn't scale well in some scenarios, and those are often the most important ones.
Is it possible to do that through Veracity? I don't want to use a non-Veracity based solution when Veracity already supports it.
this is from 1997. much easier to do this in 2026.
Does Nix keeps old version indefinitely ?
Like, you can do the same with any distro and say Puppet or Ansible but only to within that distro packages, any 3rd party stuff (and people use more and more stuff that's 3rd party to the distro) might just have dead link for the download.
Also, plain restore from backup is still faster
I typically use restores from backups for my personal computer as opportunities to clean things up.
Tell that to MinIO users, lol.
In my experience that works in box like 80% of the time. Which is great! But a backup is great in case it doesn’t.
If you are wondering ‘How are you getting that much failure’, it’s because I like to freeze older versions and they often decay for one reason or another (can’t get files for example)