Local Backup

You can never know when a hard drive will fail or a software update will cause your operating system to fail to boot.  It's always best to be prepared and build yourself a safety net.  A simple yet effective backup solution is simply an external hard drive connected to your server. 

Timeshift is an application that runs in the background on your server and performs backups to a local storage drive.  This serviceonlyservice only copies files as they change, making it easy to perform incremental backups daily or weekly. These can be created on a schedule and old backups being automatically deleted to free up space as needed.

In the event of a systems failure, we can use the command line version of Timeshift to restore our system from the latest backup.

We can install Timeshift using the terminal:

sudo apt-get install -y timeshift

Once installed, we can open it with:

sudo timeshift-gtk

While connecting through RDP, this command temporarily allows the root user's GUI applications to launch through xrdp: 
xhost si:localuser:root

The first time we open Timeshift, it'll start a configuration wizard. 

We will be asked what mode we want to use for our backups and we will select 'rsync'.

Timeshift will begin to estimate the backup size by scanning our systems files. 

Once it's completed, we'll be asked to decide where we will be storing our backups.  We can select the Storage drive that we mounted earlier.

Next, we'll have choose our snapshot level.  This allows us to customize how often we want our backups to run.  Weekly backups are a great starting point, but running them nightly can help you get back up and running faster.

Timeshift will ask if you want to backup the home directories for root and your account.  We should choose to enable both.

Now that we have finished setup, we can create our first backup by hitting the 'create' button. 

A window will appear to show us the current progress.

Once the backup is completed, you're safe in the event of a backup. 

Timeshift will automatically backup your computer on the schedule we selected