Rdiff-backup VS tmux

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.

This got me thinking about my recent pivot, my switch to Neovim by way of LazyVim to write most of my code, and using tmux to keep terminal states alive after closing a session.

I use Tmux. It's a terminal-agnostic multiplexer. Gives you persistence and automation superpowers.

https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki

Having a common set of tools already set up in different windows or sessions in Tmux or Zellij is obviously an option, but there is a subset of us ( 👋 ) that would rather just have fingertip access to our common tools inside of our editor.

Once you have your Mac or Linux machine ready, make sure to downlaod and install TMUX (Terminal Mulitplexer). A lot of our scripts are going to be running headless inside of a TMUX session as it's an incredibly clean way to manage and organise different workspaces simultaneously. A lot of our scripts will help us to interact with TMUX so don't worry if it looks a little intimidating at first. You can install TMUX using your package manager in the terminal, use whichever applies to you:

After having spent too much time trying to get the simple https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/ features into mainline tmux (last November https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/3753), maybe it'd be easier to jump ship as use zellij?

Could anyone offer recommendations on "riced" zellij configuations, or just a demo where it shows doing with (say charts of disk usage per folder), watching a movie with mpv + keeping a vim to type on?

Well, I now use tmux and tmuxinator. I have had many failed tmux attempts over the years, but I'm firmly bedded in now.

Which leads me to clipboards. Linux has two of them! Adding to the interest, I typically use Neovim remotely, via an SSH connection to a Tmux session. And on my Linux system, I use urxvt as my terminal program. All of these are very UNIX-y tools, and somehow they all need to play nicely together.

The downside of overmind is that it requires tmux, which is a terminal multiplexer tool. If you don't already use tmux, I'd say it's probably not worth learning it just for the purposes of using overmind. But if you're like me and already know/use tmux, this can be a great solution to pursue.