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I lost years of work to an IBM Deathstar[1], after which I learned the value of backups. Since then I've had two more disks fail on me, both early SSDs. The abi

I lost years of work to an IBM Deathstar[1], after which I learned the value of backups. Since then I've had two more disks fail on me, both early SSDs. The ability to be back up and running quickly has been essential both times. Though I've upgraded disks multiple times by cloning to the new drive, very smooth so that's a nice bonus. The main thing is that's so simple. There's one thing to remember, and I get back exactly what I had. Having to manually curate a list of things to back up is exactly what I want to avoid, since I might miss something important and only know when it's too late. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar

prmoustache 3y ago
Well ultimately only my homedir is important. The rest (package list, /etc, partitionning) is just for convenience and speeding up the recovery process but it is never critical. Full disk recovery was very useful when computers were offline but nowadays you can install apps so quickly you can do it on demand really. I've been in situations where I would switch from one computer to another and I would just copy the homedir. The apps are just installed whenever I need them. Oh needs git, awscli or kubectl? 30s later all are installed and in use.