aconfmgr VS Home Manager using Nix

Establishing a backup strategy. I'm using BTRFS with snapper and a pacman hook that creates a new snapshot before each upgrade. With ext4 I used timeshift. Besides that, I save my arch configuration with aconfmgr and my files with borg

Since my last cloning I've setup aconfmgr and and systemd-homed. I've also been playing around with archinstall configs to partition the system with encryption how I like. In the future I'm planning to use archinstall and aconfmgr to setup a new system for me and then I'll copy over the backup of my home directory.

try this https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr

Have you tried aconfmgr? In addition to installing packages, it also tracks configurations in /etc and modified files.

For my backup I keep files in my home directory synced with my NAS via syncthing. For my system backup I don't actually backup up my system, I configure my system via aconfmgr and that config is stored in my home directory and synced to my NAS. Using aconfmgr to "backup" my system is extremely space effecient, my aconfmgr config is only 1.7 MB.

aconfmgr (in AUR) can be used to save and restore system configurations and installed packages. For user configuration you can use a dotfile manager like chezmoi (in repo).

I know you prefer backing up manually, but aconfmgr might be for you.

To get something closer to nix on arch I like to use aconfmgr.

For those who are not familiar with Arch's aconfmgr, well I have not used it before but just saw it in a post. But it seems to be a configuration manager for Arch. It tracks, manages, and restores your Arch Linux OS configuration.

It's probably overkill for what you are trying to do. But I have been using home-manager [0] as a way to quickly restore my working environment.

[0] https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/

$ home-manager --version 23.05 $ nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-23.11.tar.gz home-manager $ nix-channel --update $ nix-shell '' -A install [...] All done! The home-manager tool should now be installed and you can edit /home/MY-USERNAME/.config/home-manager/home.nix to configure Home Manager. Run 'man home-configuration.nix' to see all available options. $ home-manager --version 23.05

Unfortunately until we find more volunteers in this area, it is hard to see status quo changing. See also https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues/607 and this ongoing project https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager

> Channels are, AFAIU, a reference to some point-in-time/commit/version of nixpkgs

It's not specifically nixpkgs, but any Nix code generally.

Per the Nix manual[0]:

> Channels are a mechanism for referencing remote Nix expressions and conveniently retrieving their latest version.

e.g. home-manager's suggested channel is just the github tarball for the relevant branch[1]:

  nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager

It sounds like you'd benefit a lot from Nix/NixOS [1], if not just home-manager[2].

1. https://nixos.org/

2. https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager nix-channel --update nix-shell '' -A install

I'm using flakes and home manager and not really sure how to go about managing my neovim configuration. I've read through some other posts, github issues, and various articles trying to suss out a good way to do this. Reading through other people's configs and posts was somewhat helpful but there is a lot going on I don't understand and everyone's examples I've seen vary wildly.

Said store path contains the home-manager repo. After the home-manager run, the store path is recreated.

I can't answer all your questions, but home-manager does have a dconf module that would probably be better to use than that external tool. Everything inside the options block are the things you can pass to the dconf module.