Hello, I’ve been a long time Linux user but I had a 5 years break and I am coming back to it now.
I’ve been trying several Linux distributions in the past week, installing the packages and configuring them as I need with several different orders of success.
My last case was an Ubuntu installation that I was very happy with and pretty close to call it setup and done, until I installed virtualbox and restarted the system only to find it bricked.
Obviously I could try to drop into one of the terminals on ctrl + alt + Fx and fix it, but I wonder if I could be smarter about it and be more prepared for this kind of situation.
One of the starting points I think would be having a separate home partition from the rest of the system. I used to have it in the past and it was great.
But then what’s next? What are the best FS I could pick for each type of partition? A performant one to keep the code and package manager cache, a journaling/snapshop based one for system, another type for game data, etc etc.
What if I would like to have a snapshot of working version of my system backed up somewhere ready to restore as simple as simple as possible?
How do you configure your systems in order to quickly recover from an unexpected bricking without growing some more white hairs, and squeezing as much performance vs feature for each of your use case?
Never had a backup system, but then again I haven’t used Linux that much. Though considering installing Debian again. Last time I looked at btrfs which seemed dope but there was something weird about it which made me ditch it. Maybe it was that I don’t know that much about Linux and configuring automatic backups seemed difficult.
Right now I’m using Garuda Linux, it takes a snapshot during major updates. Easily restored if something breaks.
Time shift saved my but a time or two in the past.
I have my EFI boot partition with 512M on /boot, zram instead of swap, then a whole lot of btrfs subvolumes, with RAID across several disks. I do a lot of snapshotting, and auto-snapshotting, but thats mostly for local rollback. I only btrfs-send to a machine on the LAN. For my real backups I use Restic, sending that data to a number of places.
Nothing, I just corupted my hard drive with all my college work for tomorrow and im trying to save them, im feeling so stupid rn, im nothing but a failure at this point
I hope that this link can help save your data. You might need an external HD to recover the data to as well as a live USB you can install testdisk to.
https://www.howtogeek.com/700310/how-to-recover-deleted-files-on-linux-with-testdisk/
Here is a video and there are plenty more on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jbWfGePrqo&t=0
Maybe you can get an extetion from your professorto buy yourself a bit more time to recover your data? Best of luck.
500 MiB ESP mounted at /efi
Swap equal to my RAM at /home/swapfile
Root equal to 25% of my disk, formatted with btrfs with auto snapshots.
Home takes the rest of my disk, formatted with btrfs WITHOUT AUTO SNAPSHOTS, so swap works.
