Sounds like what I’ve been doing manually for a while now as I learn more. For my desktop I have three scripts. One to install Alpine on full disk encryption. One for the initial setup up to the first required reboot and the last for the remaining setup plus transferring files.

I’ve been learning how to edit files with sed, cat, echo and tee commands to help automate everything from a fresh install.

Similar process for my Pi’s except I just copy-paste blocks of commands through a terminal instead of a script.

To transfer files to all their proper directories, I have a whole system for that using rsync. I basically keep a bare-bones directory tree with only the files I have worked on. Then I have an rsync command to send all those files onto the Pi’s file system in a way that retains all the files and folder’s attributes.

I wrote an rsync tool for myself to help me keep all these commands in files that I can neatly organize. I use that tool so much that it’s now my entire backup system. With a bunch of files organized with numbers, I can automate the backup of my phone, two pi’s and laptop to a partition on my laptop, then an additional copy to my external SSD in one command. And I have very high confidence in my restores since I do that frequently while testing new stuff. I also failed a lot before to get that much confidence.

I have issues with over organization if you couldn’t tell by now hahaha.

Container databases seem as simple as shutting down a container, running a backup and then starting the container again. Although my my experience is only from hosting a Lemmy/PieFed instance. I did make many backups and restores with no issues to the database. It all worked as I intended it to work.

I would imagine a similar process for non container databases. Stop, backup, restart. Although someone with more experience would be better to answer that.

I personally use rsync since I do most my work by command line these days. It’s taken nearly half a year really understand it but it offers the flexibility I desire.

I have a small network with only a handful of devices. I keep all my incremental backups on encrypted partitions and encrypted detachable SSD’s which I manually decrypt. Rsync is set up to use SSH so there’s some form of encrypted transfers but that’s not actually a priority for me, just an added benefit.

I also use rsync to sync files and directories while maintaining additional system attributes across multiple systems. That is to say, what’s root or user accessible stays root or user accessible after the transfer is complete.

If I desired more protection, I’d probably look into Borg backup. Currently I just use encryption as an annoyance deterrence method. I also stick to the base Rsync command because every other option I tried brought with it complexities which have all failed me. I at least have a high level confidence in my backup/restore process now.

How do you think Ansible can help me? I’ve read about it a few times but it’s hard for me to understand it’s actual usage without spending time playing with it.

I can possibly look into it a bit more in the future. I’ve got a few things I’m working on like learning how to do TLS with Caddy so I can reduce my dependency with Cloudflare.

I haven’t tried arch at all. I used Linux Mint for a year, LMDE for a year and only really started working with command line since last December. I think I chose to try Alpine because I wanted my web facing devices to have the least amount of software installed. Security-wise it made sense to me to have less surface area to exploit.

It took a bit extra effort for me to learn how to use OpenRC as the init system. As well as learning Linux from a bare bones linux perspective.

I actually found using Busy-box Ash interesting to work with and that’s the only shell I currently use. I even wrote a whole script around Rsync in a POSIX friendly way because I liked the idea portable scripting.

If you’re interested, I can send you a link that contains the setup notes for my server. It’s about 85% of my setup process, the rest being some files that are mostly customization that I rsync into place towards the end of the setup process. That can give you an idea of what Alpine on ARM is like.

I can appreciate that about Debian. Common tools and stability can be both convinient and reliable. Learning linux is already overwhelming with choices.

Even though I use Alpine for all my Pi boards and laptop, I keep a live usb partition of Linux Mint Debian Edition as my emergency backup. It just works.

My frustration with Raspberry Pi OS is that the packages available were constantly out of date. Some were 2 to 3 years out of date.

I eventually started using Alpine linux on my Pi boards and have been happy since then. Now I can use the latest Docker and Podman packages without manually adding new repositories.

If I didn’t prefer Alpine’s minimal approach, I would have probably gone with Debian because of it’s history in stability.

I can’t remember a time where I didn’t have issues with syncing apps. They always just seem to stop working and it’s always frustrated me. It feels like to me there’s too much complexity under the hood and it exhausts me when something goes wrong.

As a result I’ve been using rsync commands as a way to sync files and folders. After the initial setup, I haven’t experienced any issues and it’s been consistent and reliable. I even created my own tool which simplifies each rsync command into a file for easier syncing/restoring of my data. I use it to sync between my laptop, android phone using Termux terminal and my two Raspberry Pi’s.

Rsync does have limitations like not being able to do two-way syncing but for my usage I am okay with that. I’m generally backing up data in most cases. Rsync does offer more flexibility since it’s a command line tool so I’m able to create backups of my entire system or sync specific files and folders. I can also set up cron jobs to have syncs performed periodically but I mainly do all my syncing manually because I like to see where all my data is moving.

As long as all my devices have static IP addresses within the network and I don’t mess around with any directory names/locations, everything just works and I’ve had a lot less headaches managing my data and backups. I also have a lot more confidence in my backup/restore process when compared to when I used other syncing programs/apps in the past.

I have a few small services I’ve been hosting on a Raspberry Pi 5 but ever since I saw a list of no JavaScript/CSS/HTML sites, I’ve been interested in hosting some simple pages just for myself. I’ll probably look into something that can create simple pages with markdown because it’s something simple that I’m already comfortable with.

I created my own script/tool using rsync to handle backups and transferring data.

My needs are quite smaller with just a computer and two Raspberry Pi’s but I found rsync to be really useful overall.

My backup strategy is to make a complete backup on the local device (Computer / RPi4 / RPi5) then copy all those backups to a Storage partition on my computer, then make a whole backup from the partition to an externally attached SSD.

The RPi’s both use docker/podman containers so I make sure any persistent data is in mounted directories. I usually stop all containers before performing a backup, especially things with databases.

Everything in the docker containers is either hit or miss when it comes to restoring. The simple docker images restore as it they were untouched and will launch like nothing happened. I have a PieFed instance that must be rebuilt after restoring a backup. Since PieFed’s persistent data is in mount points, everything works perfectly after a fresh build.

I can send a link to my rsync tool if that’s any interest to anyone. I’ve found it super useful for backups and minimizes so much headache for myself when it comes to transferring files between different network connected devices.