Like say I take my existing drives, full of totally working media, and duplicate them, use the originals as a backup and the new drives as the active.

Does that count as a backup? No restoration involved.

[–] deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 6 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

In the spirit of this thread: no.

Recovering with the backup should put you back to an operational state equivalent to when the backup was taken.

I.e. if you've restored some files, but something is still not working then the backup failed its purpose.

E.g. the timestamps on the files might be important, do they need to be stamped with the time of the backup or the time of the restore?

[–] CentipedeFarrier@piefed.social 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

Sure, if my active drives died after this swap, and I had to restore from the old, now backup, drive, I’d be back at the operational state I was at the time of the backup.

That tracks.

It still doesn’t run anything tho. It’s just a drive. It doesn’t house an os or anything, just files that aren’t restricted in any way.

[–] deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 5 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

IMHO there is no point backing up an OS drive, just rebuild it*.

Data is the important thing to back up because you usually can't regenerate it.

* the corollary here is that you've backed up the configuration required to rebuild the OS.

[–] CentipedeFarrier@piefed.social 3 points 4 hours ago

I wouldn’t, I keep all of my data separate from my OS drive entirely so I can reformat or install a new OS whenever I feel like.. nasty old habit from bootleg windows 7 well beyond its age, when reformatting every 6 months was good hygiene, before I found Linux.. but gave me great data management insight.

[–] OwOarchist@pawb.social 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Do you know how to transfer the files back if your OS has completely failed?

[–] CentipedeFarrier@piefed.social 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Sure, nearly everything is on a separate drive from the OS. I don’t put much on the OS drive on any of my computers unless it needs to run there and that’s easy to reinstall. Easy to fix things that way.