deb-get VS Rdiff-backup

deb-get For last resort. But DistroBox and Flatpak will give you all the software you want.

There's no dark magic involved. That software basically has its own repository built in: https://github.com/wimpysworld/deb-get/blob/main/01-main/README.md

Install and use Deb get if the software center does not satisfy your needs

The first thing I would do here is make sure that your keyboard is set to the correct locale and layout. You can check this under Settings -> Keyboard The next thing to note is that the key code send by laptop keyboards are often proprietary and don't work out of the box. You can use xev / xorg-xev to see what key code is returning and update your key bindings. What is the recommended way to install applications? Ignore the Pop OS shop? Is it an app to app decision? Thank you for the recommendation. Use apt or the pop shop for most things but for proprietary things I'd use deb-get or just download directly. Flatpaks and Snaps are great but doesn't always have the best system level integrations. This is a serious problem with Linux on the desktop in general and I'm looking forward to an os agnostic package format becoming dominate.

Lastly, deb-get + pacstall + bauh. All of these combined covers 99% of my software needs, much less need to find and install PPAs and .deb manually. Still not as convenient as AUR, but much better than it was before. Hopefully, eventually everything is on Flatpak, snap, or AppImage so I could just use Bauh for most apps, but for now, I'm glad that these tools exists.

I got my start to Linux with PopOS, and so I will vouch for that. They look good, have good tools, and cares a lot about the desktop experience. Also, they have a built-in recovery partition, so even if you f'd yourself, you can reset from the Settings menu or from the boot menu. It is Ubuntu-based, and be sure to check out deb-get and pacstall for some third-party apps.

apt-get and deb-get is totally different. apt-get is deb default, deb-get is different. Here, read up on it. https://github.com/wimpysworld/deb-get

Nice. If you're looking for apps on PopOS and other Ubuntu derivatives, you can also use deb-get and pacstall to get certain 3rd party and proprietary apps not in the package manager.

For starters it has a tendency to paint itself into a corner on ENOSPC situations. You won't even be able to perform a restore if a backup was started but unfinished because it ran out of space. There's this process of "regressing" the repo [0] which must occur before you can do practically anything after an interrupted/failed backup. What this actually must do is undo the partial forward progress, by performing what's effectively a restore of the files that got pushed into the future relative to the rest of the repository, which requires more space. Unless you have/can create free space to do these things, it can become wedged... and if it's a dedicated backup system where you've intentionally filled disks up with restore points, you can find yourself having to throw out backups just to make things functional again - even ability to restore is affected.

That's the most obvious glaring problem, beyond that it's just kind of garbage in terms of the amount of space and time it requires to perform restores. Especially restores of files having many reverse-differential increments leading back to the desired restore point. It can require 2X the file's size in spare space to assemble the desired version, while it iteratively reconstructs all the intermediate versions in arriving at the desired version. Unless someone fixed this since I last had to deal with it, which is possible.

Source: Ages ago I worked for a startup[1] that shipped a backup appliance originally implemented by contractors using rdiff-backup. Writing a replacement that didn't suck but was compatible with rdiff-backup's repos consumed several years of my life...

There are far better options in 2024.

[0] https://github.com/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup/blob/master/src...

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/axcient

and that should install the latest version, rdiff-backup-2.2.4-2.el8.x86_64.rpm. This is all described in the rdiff-backup README file.

Rdiff-backup - close to what you do currently but at least provides versioning. Based on rsync

as in just a copy of your files? This I would barely consider a backup, more of just a mirror from a point in time. What're you missing by doing this? versions of files, deduplication, and encryption (last one being very important for the best kind of backups, which should be off-site). Just because it's not files doesn't mean it's proprietary. Proprietary would mean secret and undocumented. There are many great options. Borg is my favorite but Kopia is probably better if you use windows, urbackup is an option if you want centralized management of backups and rdiff-backup is if you want something kinda what you have currently but adding versioning but lacks deduplication and encryption.

If you're comfortable with the cli and you want to have your backup in a plain file format with some incremental backups, there's rdiffbackup. It uses rsync under the hood and has worked quite well for me.

Rdiff Backup - Reverse differential backups that uses rsync, linking, and can tunnel via ssh. You get a full current backup with increments available to restore any version of the file with minimal storage space used.

borg is great. we've been using it for the past 3 years to archive hundreds of file-level backups of servers, database dumps and VM images. average size of each borg repo is few GB but there are few outliers up to few hundreds of GB.

borg replaced https://rdiff-backup.net/ for us and gave:

Robocopy is great if you don't have access to rsync. If rsync via WSL2 for instance is an option, I'd personally go with rdiffbackup.