forgot my laptop somewhere (backup update)

The past days I’ve traveled around the region a bit to attend a conference and because it ended up being closer to my parents home than to mine I spent the day at them after a long and great conference dinner.

In the early morning I had to leave again because back home I had classes to attend. But somehow packing rapidly to leave I forgot my laptop.

The following is now an update on what I found out during that few days until I had my main machine again about my backup strategy and recovery in case of a loss, it being stolen or whatever else.

If you haven’t read it yet, you may be interested in the first part in which I’ve set up backups to protect me from what happened.

problems

To start off with the problems I’ve found, let us take the hardware.

As “temporary” device I had my previous other two laptops to select:

So I ended up using the mac for the first day without the laptop and the x220 the second day after having learnt from day one.

On the software side there were only minor problems comparably when using the x220 then. Because the host was already running nixos I could just git pull my current configuration, rebuild and was all set on that front.

Only the things I have not bothered fully yet to set up with nix were the ones that ended up breaking in the end.

1. xournalpp : home.file didn’t work recently with a plugin I wrote for xournalpp for some reason, so I just put the files in .config manually. Such that nix has no supervision but it works on no other host.

2. PFERD : is a good scraper for my universities web system, to not have to interact with a horribly slow website oneself. But there are not too many users which results in there not being a home-manager module for it with reasonable secret management. Currently it’s also just a file in .config.

3. mail : I currently use a mix of neomutt and thunderbird for mail. Neomutt to reasonably write the longer mails I write maybe once a week in nvim and thunderbird to have a good overview over a few accounts. Neomutt I have (more or less well) integrated in my nix config but thunderbird as well as the calendar there not at all. That’s something yet to fix.

At last I want to mention syncthing. I’m using it to sync directories for keepass-db / uni / research / media / etc. But the problem I face with it is primarily that all the streams were going through my main laptop, and when that one is not accessible then my system is not able to work.

One solution that I’m thinking about implementing is then to have a local server (just a rpi5) as the main host with whom all the clients interface.

That way ideally every client could be missing in the network and the synchronisation would still work flawlessly.

things that did work well

What I was the most happy about was that very essential parts of my backup setup did work, which were borg and nixos.

With borg I was able to just get the most recent of my hourly backups from the main machine and access pretty much every file in the home directory.

And nixos did allowed me to use neomutt, nvim, git, WM, etc. on the x220 exactly as I would’ve used it on t470 (main host) because it was build deterministically from the very same packages up the same versions.

Another vital component was the host having a keepass-db accessible such that I can login into anything but that too could be recovered from my borg archive after the local version on the x220 was a few weeks old and didn’t have all the passwords I needed.

conclusion

Overall I’m happy that I did forget the laptop somewhere for a bit to figure those things out. If I’ll find some time in the next weeks then I’ll fix the problems I’ve found.