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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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What is your partitioning strategy to achieve a stable, backup-able and recoverable system? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello, I've been a long time Linux user but I had a 5 years break and I am coming back to it now.

I've been trying several Linux distributions in the past week, installing the packages and configuring them as I need with several different orders of success.

My last case was an Ubuntu installation that I was very happy with and pretty close to call it setup and done, until I installed virtualbox and restarted the system only to find it bricked.

Obviously I could try to drop into one of the terminals on ctrl + alt + Fx and fix it, but I wonder if I could be smarter about it and be more prepared for this kind of situation.

One of the starting points I think would be having a separate home partition from the rest of the system. I used to have it in the past and it was great.

But then what's next? What are the best FS I could pick for each type of partition? A performant one to keep the code and package manager cache, a journaling/snapshop based one for system, another type for game data, etc etc.

What if I would like to have a snapshot of working version of my system backed up somewhere ready to restore as simple as simple as possible?

How do you configure your systems in order to quickly recover from an unexpected bricking without growing some more white hairs, and squeezing as much performance vs feature for each of your use case?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Not really partition related but in terms of backups, state replication and reliability:

State of Systems: NixOS configs. Art: Borg + Borgbase. Code: Git + Sourcehut.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I need to get into NixOS but I have a similar variation on servers: ansible for state of systems, Borg + Borgbase for data (kept in /srv) and code (including ansible) are in Git.

The separation between data and state is really great. You want to be able to go from a base install and only bring in everything which makes your setup different.