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Suggestion: All installation tutorials should also include instructions for backup and restoration
As someone that still considers themself to be a linux n00b, I learn from tutorials and guides. All these tutorials and other help that all of you contribute to LET (and elsewhere) is appreciated - there is no doubt about that.
However, I've noticed that while there are tons of tutorials for installing almost any application or script, there are far fewer (if any) guides for backing up and restoring individual applications and their data and configurations. Sometimes, you want to only backup that one specific application and its associated files (whether it's for creating backups or for recreation or copying to another server), not your entire server.
Is this something that other people would also find useful or am I completely oblivious to some automated application+data+configuration backup technique?
(sorry if I didn't select the most appropriate category)
Comments
It would generally be a very short guide, for most things.
Take dovecot as an example. Copy /etc/dovecot from one system to another, restart dovecot on second system, you've effectively done a backup/restore of a configuration for a single service. (Getting into versions and config syntax would be a rabbit hole, of course, but usually not an issue)
It's... complicated. Yes, full-blown system management tools exist that let you roll back specific changes to your system in an isolated manner, such as Nix + NixOS. However, these tools aren't really all that simple to use or well-documented yet. There's stateful systems like Puppet as well, but these have their own problems (as described in the article I linked about NixOS).
Package managers can roll back installations of software, but don't do any backups of configuration between for example upgrades, and they don't care at all about any file that didn't come out of the package to begin with (eg. configuration files created afterwards).
You can do full system backups, but this still means you have to pick out the files you want to restore yourself. Then there's the Docker approach where you just shove everything into its own container, and throw away the entire container if you don't want it anymore or want to start over... which has overhead / integration / maintenance problems of its own.
In the end there are just so many ways in which you can use different pieces of software together, and non-standard ways in which you can configure them, that on a typical stateful system there just isn't a universal way to cleanly roll back things. Something like Nix can do this to a near-perfect degree, but just isn't user-friendly enough yet.
As for specifically including "undo instructions" in installation tutorials, I have two thoughts on that matter:
TL;DR: Computers are a mess. Modern OSes are a mess. Nobody really knows how it all ties together, and often it just doesn't. The only way to do rollbacks reliably is to change the way an OS works, which is what NixOS does, but it's not usable enough yet for the average user.
@jarland doesn't that just mean that it is be easy for someone making the tutorial that understands where things are to add on how to backup the app/configurations?
@joepie91 that makes sense, though I do still think that it should be encouraged and that at least how to back up and restore the configurations should be included. That seems to be more straight forward.
Well yeah but is it really worth posting a tutorial when the entirety of the content is:
That's literally how to backup and remove dovecot on all Debian-based distros. Hardly worthy of a tutorial. Time would be better spent writing about how to use Linux, because if you can't figure that much out then you really need some more basic training on the OS, not an easy copy/paste.
A lot of people need to pick up a book or take a basic Linux 101 college class for one semester.
That's helpful for those of us that don't know, thank you. As I mentioned originally, it would be nice if simple, but important, things like that were included at the end of installation tutorials, not that they warrant their own tutorial.
@doughmanes while I know some people (including myself) would enjoy doing that, it requires resources (time and $) and most of us are typically short on one or both. For a student that needs credits to graduate, go for it! But, if you're past that stage and working full time with a family, it's unfortunately not as feasible.