Is it feasible to backup my entire Linux "/" directory?

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#1

I’ve recently re-installed my PC with Linux Mint, as my old Ubuntu OS kept trampling all my nVidia graphics drivers (and there other problems too).

I’d like to have an incremental backup system that can cope with effectively storing snapshots of the OS which is stored on a 256 GB SSD.

The volume of data will likely only be a few gigabytes in size and is not expected to grow much over time. Right now it’s about 7 GB according to “Disk Usage Analyser”. I’ve got a 1 Terabyte SSD available for storing the backups.

I’m thinking of doing weekly backups and deleting the older ones as time goes on.

I’ve set the backup running but the ETA says it’ll take more than 10 days!

Have I configured things wrong, or am I simply trying something too ambitious?

p.s. Originally I tried TimeShift software to accomplish this, but that software doesn’t support ZFS. Hence me trying Duplicacy.

#2

That’s really not the way to do it. While you can certainly backup your / system en-masse, this is unlikely to achieve “snapshots of the OS”. Backup solutions like :d: do not do system-level imaging by themselves, so you won’t be able to restore it into a working system. In particular, no permissions or file attributes are stored, so your restoration will be a giant mess that is basically guaranteed not to work. The only reason I see for doing snapshots like this is when you have custom config files dispersed through the system folders (think /etc/*) that you don’t care to enumerate all, and want to have a backup that you will restore manually piece-by-piece.

To do system snapshots, you’ll likely want to do a proper whole drive (or at least partition) image with some other tool meant for that (e.g. dd, Veeam etc), and then you can run :d: to backup those snapshots. Or at least something that can store the whole filesystem, e.g. fsarchiever), then :d: Keep in mind that for the best effect on running this setup you may want to keep these snapshots uncompressed (or :d: deduplication will be compromised), and you may want to tune backup parameters to keep fixed chunks, ideally the size of your drive cluster.

Source: I am running a setup similar to described above.

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