Updating Arch the right way - Please critique my practices
Hello. Please critique how I'm updating / maintaining my new Arch installation so I can fix anything I'm doing wrong. This is mostly what I could gather from the Arch wiki tailored to my system. I think I know what I'm doing - but as I've often learned, it's easy to misunderstand or overlook some things.
Step 1: perform an incremental full system backup so I have something to restore if the update borks anything. I've chosen to use the rsync command as laid out on the wiki:
I have a large hdd mounted as a secondary drive under /media/linuxhdd. It is configured to automatically mount from fstab using uuid. Both my root drive and that hdd are formatted ext4. I'm not using the -S option because I don't think I'll be using virtual machines (I have other hard drives I can make bootable). --delete is used so I maintain one current set of files for restore purposes. This keeps the copying and transfer time to a minimum. (I maintain disk images offline with a different tool - this is simply one local copy for easy restoration purposes)
Step 2: Check the Arch wiki - follow instructions for any manual steps
Step 3: once every 1-2 months, update the mirror list using reflector
Maybe it is too late because of your filesystem choice but btrfs snapshots delievers enough security if something goes wrong. Rsync seems like a little bit overhead for updating only
There is even a pacman hook that makes pre and post snapshots of your filesystem with snapper. Tldr: most of your steps can be automated with pacman hooks. But if you like it this way its fine
Yup you are 100% correct. I didn’t understand what btrfs brought to the table until i started playing around with backups. What I really need is a snapshot since my backups really are handled differently. I may reformat simply for this reason. (Or I’ll switch things up the next time I break something)
than continue to follow the arch wiki guide, fstab will be wrong, the bootloader needs to be reinstalled. while you are chrooted into it, you will need to reinstall linux to rebuild initramfs.