Server hardware backup
Server hardware backup
Hello!
This question is not about backing up your data; like git, photos & videos etc.
I have a Lemmy server running Linux Mint and I wonder if there could be a way to backup like the OS data (and installed packages) so when the mobo fries (for example) I can just back it up into a spare server (installing Mint)?
Obviously the premise is that I can backup that important stuff correctly.
I'm asking because I'm a Linux noob and was confronted with the Mint backups and rollbacks. Very smooth BTW, for a virgin system anyways. Also because I hate installing and configure stuff (like Lemmy docker + nginx) and would love knowing the downtime would be minimal.
So sort of having a hardware backup.
Just toss your drives into the new machine. Any reconfiguring for the new hardware would be pretty minimal with Mint.
Would that work with, say Lemmy config?
It'd work for everything, data lives in your storage devices, not the motherboard.
Barring UEFI/bios config issues or hardware incompatibility you just swap hardware and boot up exact same as before.
You might then need to make small tweaks if things aren't setup quite ideally. For instance if you have lemmy binding to a specific IP rather than 0.0.0.0 and you use dhcp reservations then you might need to adjust that IP in config. Or if you don't have fstab using uuid then your mounts might be messed up. But that stuff can all be avoided and they're minor to fix.
Never run a lemmy server but I can't think of anything offhand that would change lemmy configs. Honestly, IDK. You'll likely have to reconfigure your network card but that would take all of 30 seconds.
I'd probably try that out one day, with a copy.
As an alternative approach you can look into ansible. As opposed to making a system backup you can define your system configuration as code that you can redeploy with it.
Yeah but I had a hard time setting things up manually (docker), so port that to ansible would be quite the job I guess (especially nginx), and I'm toying with the idea to compile Lemmy from scratch so eventually I could help one day.