On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 19:48:05 +0000, David Higton wrote:

> In message 
>           Martin Gregorie  wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 16:22:24 +0000, David Higton wrote:
>>
>> > This build is just over a month old, which reminds me it's time I
>> > updated it again.
>> >
>> A weekly update is better - there have been and are quite a lot of
>> security holes being discovered and fixed recently.
>>
>> My personal recommendation: turn off any automatic updates you might
>> have configured and every week make a backup using rsync [1] followed
>> immediately by a Raspbian update and reboot.
>>
>> [1] use rsync because its about the fastest backup program. On an RPi
>> using a SD filing on an 8-18GB card system you may as well back up
>> everything, but really, all you need to backup is /home *provided that*
>> you keep copies of every file you change in /etc in a special directory
>> structure in /home or in your usual login.
>>
>> I use a pair of 1TB WD Essentials portable USB drives for two
>> generations of backups, but of course ymmv - you can equally use a
>> couple of SD  cards,
>> but they may fail silently - while a portable SSD or HDD is more
>> likely to give you warnings, particularly if you fsck it as the last
>> action in every backup run. Note:
>>
>> - Write a shell script to automate the backup process - makes life a
>>  lot easier
>> - Using a set of biggish backup devices and makes it easy to back up
>>  several systems onto a single device set of HDDS or SSDs.
>> - Always keep the backup set offline, preferably in a firesafe or in a
>>  separate building or garden shed.
>
> I don't think you read what I posted, Martin.  I use RISC OS.
>
I missed RiscOS. Apologies, but if you can port rsync to it, that could
be worth doing, for the backup speed you'll gain.

Apart from that, what I had to say about update frequencies and
(especially) syncing system updates with backups and not trusting backups
to SD cards should apply regardless of the OS: I learnt most of that from
working with mainframes and early UNIX systems and find its equally
relevant for systems Linux or any other OS.

--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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