Backing up Ubuntu

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 7 Jul 2019 10:44:32 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>On Sun, 7 Jul 2019 17:28:22 +1000, Jared Norris wrote:
>>seems silly to have to power down to backup  
>
>But you are in favour of tools that require to power down the machine,
>too. You either need to make a snapshot or to backup a shut down
>system.
>
>Since you guess you understand rsync, google a little bit. I for
>example found this within a few seconds https://rsnapshot.org/.

I've got the impression that they also misuse the term snapshot.

The terms "backup" and "snapshot" are often misused terms, so a lot of
users guess that they are safe, while they aren't.

In Apple stores they claim that everything could be restored from an
iOS backup by Apples backup strategy, but that's wrong, iOS app
developers of professional apps warn against such cluelessness. On Linux
we unfortunately have huge communities with echo chamber effects, so
after a while cluelessness become alternative facts.

What ever backup strategy you will use, I recommend to do several test
backups and test restores.

It might work very often without a "real" snapshot or a shut down
machine, but keep in mind, there are a lot of non-atomic operations and
race conditions out there. Soon or later you might get an inconsistent
backup.