*BTRFS users when you don't rebalance soon enough and run out of inodes so you can't boot your computer

I was introduced to it by a synology nas a decade ago, and it's my preferred fs. I wish proxmox supported it, my compute server had to go with ext4 since it's got one disk for the system, and one for the VMs, no redundancy. They say it's in 'tech preview' but most mainstream distros have had it for years now...

The ideal system probably is something like btrfs snapshot, then restic or similar of that snapshot to a remote disk.

Btrfs doesn't dedup identical data at different locations. Restic (or anything similar non-filesystem-level) cannot take an atomic snapshot. If you have something like a PostgreSQL database, where the DBMS ensures that what's on disk is valid at any point in time, but only to an atomic view of the thing, you probably want an atomic snapshot of it.

I dunno if anyone has a single off-the-shelf utility that does both steps together.

I don't remove orphan packages, I don't setuo snapshots, I don't read arch news.

I sudo pacman -Syu. And if I can't boot I don't do it

Zfs does atomic snapshots and also computes the diff between snapshots when you zfs send/receive to remote. You can set up syncoid scripts to do all of this automagically and ensure source and dest match, have regular snapshots, and to manage retention schhedules on both ends.

You're technically right, but the way most people use dd ensures its like handling a loaded gun. How often do you cp /dev/sdwhy?

Manjaro isn't Arch. Doesn't use the same repos.

How often do you need to rebalance?

I know people who've driven drunk for more than a decade, and only crashed when they were sober. Does that mean drinking and driving is safe?

I literally had one of my devices fail to boot after an update pretty much every month, and another a few times a year. Sure, I was able to fix it with only arch-chroot, but when I switched to btrfs I didn't need to carry around a flash drive with me when updating the system...

The last few years I'm on nixos, and while it sometimes fails to update, it has not once failed to boot.

Why would you want your entire home folder in syncthing?

meh, just backup home.

stresstest your io i guess

I'm very attached to my ~/.cache !

When the moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars,
then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars.

my current openSUSE install with btrfs has lived for about 6 years now and I haven't done any manual maintenance on btrfs

I think some distros have a systemd service that does it weekly or monthly which is usually enough but in rare cases it's not, just know that if you suddenly get out of space errors on BTRFS but you're not actually out of space that's probably the issue

also, machines wipe themselves at each boot! service state data is distributed via zfs send! zfs that actually works!

I feel attacked! (but I have /home separate; and backups of everything except big game installs I can easily reinstall)

Timeshift has indeed saved my distro's ass a few times. But is not a silver bullet. In the end I keep most of my stuff on an external HD and in there a folder with some notes and data about my distro configuration. If he dies (and he did) I'll bring him back.

My last Arch death was updating my 128GB laptop after a year and breaking it with partial updates. (I’m better at partial updates now)
It also made me want to, move away from having separate /home partition. It was somewhat sad, since it was the Arch that I installed on the previous laptop and just moved the SSD when I got a new one

It still gets updates and still works so why jump ship.

Wherever people say "Manjaro just broke" it's good odds they tried to use it like an Arch install. Installing drivers "the Arch way", pointing the repos at Arch, using bleeding edge kernel versions etc.

It may be Arch but it's been set up in a certain way and if you mess with it it won't work. Not messing with it is the whole point of the distro.

It does have a wiki and forums etc. so I feel that if people read a bit before doing stuff we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Me with arch: what is timeshift? Time to updstr without backup, lol!

Yes, but actually no.

It's the opposite for me.

I have / on SSD (less writes) and /var and /home on HDD

Thats's a really bad analogy

One endangers others while the other makes a couple of files and photos go poof

Yeah i never bothered with separate /home because it feels like such a balancing act to decide on size compared to root. Especially when you use nix/guix, it would be annoying to have a small root with the store filling up over time and having to do garbage collecting often. Also, i just back up whatever files i want to make sure i don't lose, and when i do a clean install i actually want everything to be wiped anyway, including home.

/ size becomes an issue when you install games via pacman

Probably my installed games alone are larger than that

I think it's very much dependent on your hardware.

I had some issues with my Nvidia drivers getting messed up when the card was relatively new. I haven't had any issues in the past two years though.

I wouldn’t call every 2 years "constantly"

In one of my university java courses, another student was frequently compiling Gentoo packages on his laptop during class.

Once I researched more about it I also installed Gentoo on my laptop and started building updates during class 😁

Syncthing will also propagate removals or bad edits

You update arch every 2 years?

I will simply reinstall and forsake my files if it shits the bed catastrophically

I'm rawdogging my Debian Unstable install

It's been a while but for me personally, the number one thing that saves your ass in event of failure is installing both the up to date and the LTS kernel. If you fail to boot, it's gonna have something to do with a kernel update 90% of the time, in which case you just boot with the LTS kernel. Just about anything else can be fixed either while you're up and running, or with a live distro installed on a USB.

Seriously. I've spent more time maintaining my debian home server than I have my two arch installs combined.

I always back up anything that I feel is actually important, do people actually rely on the stability of their OS?

Not that Arch has caused me any issues whatsoever so far, going on 2 years now while very much a Linux noob.

symlink the directories to somewhere on another partition

you know after installing god knows how many distros and reinstalling just the same it's like easy peasy to get anything installed now and up and running/configured the way I like it within an hour. Especially if you git repo your configs. I have my Suckless suite of stuff in a repo so when I install a new distro or reinstall something I just clone that repo and i'm good to go. all my important data is backed up with borg. it all works across any distro and even BSDs.

Git repo your configs/DEs/WMs folks. such a massive time saver.

Meh, I keep everything important on a separate drive altogether.

there are two types of computer users

1. those who make backup
2. those who never had a hard disk crash

Just get your snapper to run before/after any update and if you bork something, roll back. Easy peasy

1. Everything is replaceable

Where are those people whose arch installs break after every second update? I don't think I had a single problem with arch that I wasn't responsible for. Hell, I had more problems with mint on my girlfriends PC than the arch machines that I'm running.

1. Assuming you do have a backup

I honestly can't think of a thing I'd want to backup. Game saves, resumes, media. Its all replaceable and not worth backing up. I dont think I have a single "important" document or picture or anything.