Backup VS Vagrant

I used to be a huge fan of https://github.com/backup/backup, but unfortunately it doesn't get updates. Still works though. I ran hundreds of gigs each night through that tool. There's a golang version re-write that is limited on the features - https://github.com/huacnlee/gobackup.

Running NixOS on a virtual machine (VM) is a safe and reproducible way to test such configurations. As for VMs, I have used VirtualBox, Vagrant and lxd in the past. However, I have found QEMU to be the simplest and most flexible solution for my needs.

I found out that the error was that initialy I was using an old version of the vagrant utility for vmware: 1.0.21, so I read this post: https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/12052 and there I saw that I needed to install the new version, in my case 1.0.22 which I mentioned on the point #3.

Vagrant is a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow. Developed by Hashicorp, it is used to replicate multiple virtual environments. It can efficiently run in all virtualized environments, providing the highest level of isolation to users.

Another important tool from the same organization is Vagrant, which provides extra help in running VMs built with Packer. Of course, the choice of a VM provider is also very important, as some VM providers may not be supported on certain platforms. For example, there are no VMware or VirtualBox releases that support Apple Silicon. However, QEMU is supported on most platforms, including Apple Silicon, which is why this provider was chosen here.

https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/1052#issuecommen...

Again at this point the jokes are frankly writing themselves. Like bro make it possible for people to follow your advice.

Also if you directly state or indirectly insinuate that your tool is ANY/ALL OF Local First, or Open Source, or Free As In Freedom you better have offline docs.

If you don't have offline docs your users and collaborators don't have Freedom 1. If you can't exercise Freedom 1 you are severely hampered in your ability to exercise Freedoms 0, 2, or 3 for any nontrivial FOSS system.

The problem has gotten so bad the I started the Freedom Respecting Technology movement which I'm gonna plug here: https://makesourcenotcode.github.io/freedom_respecting_techn...

Vagrant

Take a look at Vagrant! https://www.vagrantup.com/ In my admittedly limited understanding I believe it offers closer to a nix like reproducable rather than repeatable deployments.

on the off chance one hasn't been tracking it, there were several "we don't need your stinking BuSL" projects when this drama first started:

https://github.com/opentofu#why-opentofu (Terraform)

https://github.com/openbao/openbao#readme (Vault)

and I know of several attempts at Vagrant <https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/forks> but I don't believe one of them has caught traction yet

There are also some who have talked about an "open Nomad" but since I don't play in that space I can't speak to it

It sounds like you're using Nix as a sort of configuration management solution. CM just isn't worth it for managing a single desktop IMO. It triples the effort for whenever you need to add or remove a package, as you must now add that also to your nix configuration. You're supposed to be able to make that back up in time saved restoring to the next machine, but inevitably the next machine will be different enough that you'll have to edit it all anyway. In the end I just got tired of trying to manage my own machine with infrastructure as code (though in fairness I was using puppet at the time not nix).

I keep a git repository with all my dot files in it[1]. This seems to work the best. It has a Windows folder as well, and I copy that out whenever I need to set up Windows.

A lot of people like using WSL but I hate how it hogs on my memory. Hyper-V is a terrible virtualization engine for consumer-grade use cases because it can't thin provision RAM. If I need to use docker, I will spin up a small Linux VM using vagrant[3] with Virtualbox[4] and put Docker on there. Vagrant is an extremely underrated tool in my opinion, particularly in a Windows context.

I use scoop for packages. Typically I will scoop install msys2 and then pin it so that it doesn't get blown away by the next upgrade.

Then I basically do all of my development inside of msys2. I can get most things running in there without virtualization. In my case that means sbcl and roswell for common lisp, senpai for irc, and tmux and nvim for sanity. Msys2 uses the pacman package manager and this is good enough.

All In all, I set up my Windows machine affresh after a while of not using it and it took me about 3 hours. Most of that time was just getting through upgrades though, I felt like it was pretty fast.

1: https://git.sr.ht/~skin/dotfiles

2: https://www.msys2.org/

3: https://www.vagrantup.com/

4: https://www.virtualbox.org/

Tools like Docker and Vagrant can be used to allow local environments to mimic production environments.