Owing to my lack of knowledge about linux and programming in general I have found since moving to qubes that I have a tendency to break things and then feel the need to start from scratch lest one of my amendments have compromised the very foundations upon which (my) qubes is based.
I have therefore decided to have two installs, a test install (TEST) and a production install (PROD). Test is inentionally unencrypted; this has been done with the express intention of not allowing myself to start using it over PROD as my daily driver; on the other hand PROD will be encrypted to incentivize the opposite behaviour. Given a tendency to rush things without thinking of potential consequences until after the fact, I plan to have a minimum of one day difference between the two installs so that I have time to reflect on things before they go live.
Query: Does this disparity in encryption mean that I will not be able to use backups of TEST to populate PROD when I install it tomorrow? It’s no biggie if so, the plan was to develop best practices through iteration. but i guess i thought it might be a good idea to also do a dummy backup recovery install at least once, if only so that I have seen how such a thing is done in advance of a real DR situation.
Given the things I have read about a 3-2-1 backup strategy, my plan is to use two 4TB SATA SSD drives configured in a RAID 1 (already owned presently unused) format to both learn about using RAID to incrementally back up my 2 2TB Qubes M.2 installs (PROD on NVME, Test on SAtA) at the end of each day.
Query: Although I have managed to install the two drives into a RAID array on my motherboard, the drives didn’t show up when I installed TEST earlier (previously they showed up as two seperate drives). The windows documention for my B450-F mobo talked of drivers needing to be installed for RAID, but I couldn’t find any for Fedora. How do I set this array up to allow it to be recognised, preferably in a partitioned format to facilitate a mirror for each of my M.2 drives?
Beyond this mirror, I also have a 4TB external USB drive, which I plan to use to backup the RAID mirror at the end of each week.
Query: Is there a way to automate this process, either through backup software or through writing a script. If the only way is the latter, can you suggest some resources from which I can learn how to do so?
Finally, I have 500GB of offsite storage via Proton and plan to get the rest through a different provider because ideally I would like to keep the data and the OS stored separately. This backup would be done monthly. The offsite data backup would just be a snapshot of all my files and I anticipate it being much larger than my OS backup, particularly when I finsh setting up the plex media server that i plan to subsequently build (the 4tb drives were initially for this, but i have subsequently learned that SSd is not desirable for such a build). On the other hand I would like the OS offsite backup to be incremental, so that if I fuck something up and don’t realise before the change moves from TEST to PROD, I still have the capacity to row it back without needing to start from scratch again.
Query: Is this seperatiion of data OS desirable in your opinion? achievable?
I would be grateful for any feedback or suggestions you might have on this strategy.
- I know I could just get another external enclosure and miss out the raid, but i want to learn about doing raid. If you think a different raid preferable let me know (I already have a spare should one fail).
