this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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Others have answered your question - but it may be worth pointing out the obvious - backups. Annoyances such as you describe are much less of a stress if you know you're protected - not just against accidental erasure, but malicious damage and technical failure.
Some people think it's a lot of bother to do backups, but it is very easily automated with any of the very good free tools around (backup-manager, someone's mentioned timeshift, and about a million others). A little time spent planning decent backups now will pay you back one day in spades, it's a genuine investment of time. And once set up, with some basic monitoring to ensure they're working and the odd manual check once in a blue moon, you'll never be in this position again. Linux comes ahead here in that the performance impact from automated backups can be prioritised not to impact your main usage, if the machine isn't on all the time.
Definitely a very valid point! I have a server I can back up to aswell, just gotta set it up as you say 👌
I think it's worth emphasising here: Don't put it off!
There are millions who can tell you from experience that good intentions count for nothing when it comes to backups.
I'd recommend going and setting up Timeshift right now: https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift
It's easy to set up, it takes literally 10 minutes, and if you decide later you want to use something else, you can just uninstall Timeshift and delete its backups. But in the meantime you'll be protected with backups.
It's literally the first thing I install on a new system and it's saved me multiple times from having to do a complete reinstall.
+1 to this.
You can reduce likelihood of any known risk with a preventative measure, in this case the permissions and ownership structure. That is good.
Backup does not reduce likelihood of risk.
It does something more wide-reaching, it mitigates against the bad outcome of loss (from most causes).So it defends from many unknown risks as well as known ones, and unexpected failure of preventative measures. It sort of protects you from your own ignorance and complacency.
Shit - i'm off to do some more work on backup.sh.