A big part of learning Linux is screwing up computers and starting over.

[ohvenus_baby@lemmy.ml]

What about Rsync. Does it get love? Any snapshot is good if it works. Backups are the shit.

[ohvenus_baby@lemmy.ml]

My gosh this hits home. If only I could stop tweaking. It's always just this one little thing. Then another and on until it's so fucked I don't even know where to begin. But it's magical when she works.

[cmhe@lemmy.world]

It is more about being lazy.

In most cases, where you havn't destroyed your filesystem, you can just boot another Linux from a USB stick, mount your filesystems to /mnt, chroot into it, and then investigate and fix there.

See the Archlinux wiki, even if you do not use Archlinux, it is great: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chroot

[cmhe@lemmy.world]

Well, that could have been fixed by booting from an usb stick, chrooting into you real system and either downloading and (re)installing the python package this way, or, if your package manager depends on python, download the package in the Live Linux and extracting the python package into your system, and then reinstalling it, so the package management overwrites your "manual installation".

Could be tedious, but less so that having to reinstall everything IMO.

[longpork3@lemmy.nz]

Fair, unfortunately it was a work machine that i needed operational again asap.

Luckily i image my machine monthly, so it was fairly straightforward to roll back.

[lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network]

Sure, ok, that's still my daily driver, it's incredibly stable (and no, it's not fucking outdated), but other than that it doesn't help so much against accidentally borking your system.

So in this context, I'm recommending @[email protected] NixOS.

[cyber@feddit.uk]

Might help to draw it out on paper

But, when you're done, you'll be the Encrypted Dual-Boot God !

[cyber@feddit.uk]

Maybe I'll try that next time...
I kinda feel loyal to Grub, it's been my friend for sooo looong.

[dan@upvote.au]

Snapshots let you very easily revert back to an older snapshot. They're relatively fast and lightweight.

You should have offsite backups too. Snapshots won't help if your computer catches fire, gets stolen, etc. Rsync is okay, but has a bunch of downsides:

• It only gives you a single copy.
• If the source data gets corrupted, the backup copy will also get corrupted.
• It's not safe from ransomware since the client has full write access to the rsync backup (and thus malicious code could delete the backup).

A backup solution like Borgbackup + borgmatic or restic is a better solution and solves the above issues:

• You can easily take daily backups - all the data is deduplicated so it won't take much more space (assuming you're not changing every file every day).
• Multiple backups means that if newer data is corrupted, you can just pull files from an older backup.
• Borgmatic has an append-only mode that only allows a client to add new data to a backup, and not delete any old data. This prevents the client from being able to erase the backups

[arscynic@beehaw.org]

Nearly always it's been during the live USB install of a dual-boot that a distro messes with the grub or installed grub to the USB disk itself. The fault lies with me because I'm almost blindly trusting the distro, but also with the distro for lacking proper yet succinct documentation during the install or configuration of partitions.

[baumgeist@lemmy.ml]

Not any moreso than learning any other OS. I'd just argue that it's the case if you're averse to research, reading, listening, watching, or just generally learning from others... or if you're delving into unknown territory

Personally, i'm a learn-by-doing type of lady, so I've fucked up my share of devices (I'm allergic to reading unless it's fiction), but I have yet to mess around in the kernel (it's on my todo list, for my LFS build which is TBD)