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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 25th, 2023

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  • Didn’t really hop much, started with Windows, went on to OSX, got annoyed at it and ran Arch in a VM until I was comfortable with it, then went bare-metal with it.

    Happy Arch user for some years now, though recently I’m using Fedora for work and I really like it. It’s not a good fit for some machines I’m running which need a lot of customisations to run properly.




    • I usually use bash/python/perl if I can be sure that it will be available on all systems I intend to run the scripts. A notable exception for this would be alpine based containers, there it’s nearly exclusively #!/bin/sh.
    • Depending on the complexity I will either have a git repository for all random scripts I need and not test them, or a single repo per script with Integrationtests.
    • Depends, if they are specific to my setup, no, otherwise the git repository is public on my git server.
    • Usually no, because the servers are not always under my direct control, so the scripts that are on servers are specific to that server/the server fleet.
    • Regarding your last question in the list: You do you, I personally don’t, partly because of my previous point. A lot of servers are “cattle” provisioned and destroyed on a whim. I would have to sync those modifications to all machines to effectively use them, which is not always possible. So I also don’t do this on any personal devices, because I don’t want to build muscle memory that doesn’t apply everywhere.








  • Is anything keeping you from just reinstalling the system and mounting your home into it again (maybe the majority of your customisations live in /home too)? I feel that is a lot less of a hassle than copying files around.

    In principle you should be able to restore your system by just copying all of the relevant files from the backup to their correct partitions - it can’t really get any worse if it doesn’t work.

    For the future: A backup is only any good if you know how to restore it and tested that that actually works.

    Regarding the permissions: If you do a cp fileA.txt fileB.txt fileB.txt will normally be owned by the creating user. So a sudo cp ... will create the files as root.

    I would personally use rsync with a few additional options, archive among them. This way the fs is restored exactly as it was. But that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if the files weren’t copied that way too.