[kwlug-disc] Documenting your digital life

[John Van Ostrand]

On Tue, May 20, 2025 at 2:40 PM Chris Frey <cdfrey at foursquare.net> wrote:

> On Tue, May 20, 2025 at 02:02:04PM -0400, John Van Ostrand wrote:
> > Do you keep detailed notes of household information? If so, what do you
> use?
>
> I use mediawiki for my wiki documentation.  But since I store that
> in the cloud, and since it is more complex to get going than a simple
> document in cases of disaster recovery, I don't store super-private
> information in there.
>

I prefer to use the cloud for as little as possible. One reason I used a
VPS for VPN services was that it replaces a dynamic DNS charge and keeps me
from having to buy cloud storage for files I want access to remotely and
allows me to use ISPs that put me behind a NAT. Although I haven't saved
anything yet, the next ISP change will save me money.

As you know we used TWiki at Net Direct, and I kept that at home for a
while. It was way too slow on earlier Raspis, so I switched to Dokuwiki.

I've had to recover the wiki server using documents in the wiki.
Fortunately the data is stored as .txt files under
/var/lib/dokuwiki/data/pages so it's pretty easy to read a backup.

I back it up with rsync and a mysqldump that gets flattened into a git repo,
> just in case I need to go back in time due to some externally caused
> loss of wiki-history.
>

I've been using rsnapshot for backups. It backs up to a filesystem using
rsync and ssh. I can easily add new systems, I can easily change the
rotation and generations. And best yet, It stores the backup as a
subdirectory so I can easily browse for files without needing to remember
recovery tools. It uses hard links for duplicate files. It's not smart
enough to store only diff files, or to merge identical files from different
sources, but given my use it's not a big deal.  I also don't backup the
entire system, /etc/, /home (less Downloads and cache), and /usr/local, as
well as application specific data like database files, web files, etc.

-- 
John Van Ostrand
At large on sabbatical
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