[Ideas] Why do people not make backups? How to improve that?

[fsflover]

@adw

@DoNotTrack

The GUI is very user-friendly but It’s true the time is a counterpart or at least, this is my experience.

I let it run while I’m doing other things or sleeping, so the effective time cost for me is just a few minutes.

So either you do not use the graphical UI for backups, or you do not verify your backups. In the UI, the latter requires to start over the whole procedure again in 5 hours, which is extremely annoying and why I make backups less frequently than I should.

@adw

You can write a simple shell script to handle this for you.

Which is why for most users this is too inconvenient. I’m fine with the command line, but even I can’t use it for everything. It takes time to learn new commands (there’s always too much to learn) and new users won’t be able to start doing it immediately, loosing precious time and risking their data.

@unman

In my experience providing support, I have rarely been asked to restore
a full system. I have very often been asked to restore a single file

This tells more about your specific users than the general situation. Backups of whole qubes helped me many times when qubes stop booting or I want to clone my installation to another, independent device. Also when I upgrade to a new Qubes version. I love that I don’t have to make any in-qube configuration and all installed software just works immediately after the restoration. The disk space overhead is tiny and the restoration process is straightforward. I’m happy that Qubes chose this direction by default.

@adw

@qubist

Is there also a major long-standing and unresolved issue with backup potentially not actually backing up?

Not that I’m aware of.

Here it is.