On Sun, 06 Dec 2020 03:10:50 +0000, bob prohaska wrote:

> Is there any simple rule of thumb for cleaning up before backing up?
> I'd like to avoid destroying useful things (saved login credentials)
> that notes and memory might not record accurately. The rest can go.
>
I never clean out .dotfiles. As others have said most of them are
parameter sets and/or data stores for the more complex applications you
use, such as news readers, mail readers and LibreOffice - you really,
really want to keep these dotfiles!

That said, I don't bother backing up the caches some programs create:
long ago I configured my web browsers (Firefox and Brave) to empty their
caches when they're closed. Another candidate for this treatment is
Google Earth, though you have to remember to empty its cache manually (go
to Tools:Options:Cache to do that)because automatically emptying its
cache in exit isn't a configurable option, and I exclude stuff like
the .tracker cache and similar from all backups, which I do with rsync.
Rsync is recommended because its hugely faster than making tar, gzipped
tar or zip backups. Avoid the latter because zip doesn't fully understand
Linux file permissions and ownership, unlike tar, which does.

If you're planning to do a full upgrade on the same SD card, either use
rsync to make a logical backup or use Clonezilla

http://clonezilla.org/

to duplicate the SD card. If you use Clonezilla, mount the EXT partition
on the newly copied SD card and empty the /boot directory in it - this
should be empty since its only use on an RPi is as a mountpoint for the
FAT32 boot partition.

To get clonezilla, download an iso image from their website and burn it
to a CD, which makes the CD into a bootable Debian system. Booting that
and using it to copy both partitions to a new SD card (expanding them as
needed) should leave yo with a new, bootable SD card ready for doing in
in-situ Raspi upgrade.


--
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Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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