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anticristi

Is backing up still a thing? I prefer to keep my laptop stateless:

* I use Ansible to configure a vanilla Ubuntu 18.04 into my workstation [1]

* I keep everything that is "source code-y" in some Git repo

* I keep non-source-code-y stuff in Dropbox or Seafile (both have a restore to previous version)

I prefer everything else to be lost (e.g. some AWS, K8s credentials).

I wipe my laptop between customer projects and it works great.

[1] https://github.com/cristiklein/stateless-workstation-config

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You're just outsourcing your backups, trusting github, Dropbox, etc. to have good backups.

My general rule is to be OK with any singular thing I use failing. This can be a hard drive or a company's sync product - mistakes happen even at companies. To do this I ensure for anything I care about, there are at least 2 copies that no single "thing" can touch both of.

So if some of your git repos are only hosted by a company and you have no local clones, that's a bad position to be in if the company terminates your account for whatever reason they might decide. But if you have local clones, it's fine. An ansible script can easily cover this (clone every repo you have).

If there are some files only in Dropbox, and you only have 1 computer sync'ing with Dropbox at a given time, all it takes is for Dropbox to screw something up and those files are gone. I wouldn't personally be OK with this. You might not care that much about what's in Dropbox though.

Beyond that, there are some files I don't want any service to have unless they are encrypted locally first. So I don't use Dropbox for that. Anything like that I keep in my regular documents folder. But those are mostly for my main "personal" PC, and don't need to sync those to things like laptops.

Note that recovering files in syncing services tends to have a limited time. So hopefully you notice before that time runs out. I have a friend that lost his military service documents while still using a file syncing service. We assume he accidentally deleted them years ago. Couldn't recover it.

I do this too, and am surprised not to see more recommendations for it. It's simpler than a traditional full system backup, lessens security risks like copying credentials into a backup, and IMO keeps things better organized as well. I know Dropbox or git repos are just syncing the files I care about, in a way that I want them organized and can browse on a web interface, on mobile, sync to another device even if it doesn't have all the same software installed, etc. Whereas with a full system backup, there's not always a clear line between system configuration and data files, so depending what apps you're using the data that you're backing up might only be able to be accessed again on an exact copy of the machine running all the same versions of the same apps, which is often not what I actually want.

I don't back backup my machine states, just home directory and other data.

Your laptop is not stateless, it is backed up.

What is the difference between running the Dropbox client or any other backup client?

Restic or Borg has fewer sharp edges than Dropbox does on Linux and is generally going to be lesser maintenance.

A stateless system is one that does not keep any (persistent) state.

I'd rather have some local backup of my photos, documents, conversation logs, emails than trusting Dropbox or Seafile to always be available to me. Even if I'm using a cloud backup it's still "a thing" to keep local backups, even if it's just for the speed of the restore.

A multi-layer backup strategy with local snapshots, TimeMachine, cloud backup seems like a more sensible approach.

If your git repo provider closes your account, would you lose your data?

You should probably be backing up monthly or quarterly so that you have a local copy of all those repositories.

A backup is a coherent copy of data on independent media. Seems that what you're doing is that.

That's pretty cool! I was thinking about this for a while, and just started converting my dotfiles repo to Ansible which would be a step forward.

That is not "stateless".

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