forgot my laptop somewhere (backup update)

Recently I’ve commuted back and forth to a city in the south of Germany to attend a conference for a day. The night I ended up staying at family that lived closer there but on my way back by train I’ve quickly seen that I forgot my laptop there.

This post will go through problems that made me discover in my backup system which I’ve already outlined in the first backup post.

Forgetting the Laptop somewhere is obviously not too tragic, because I knew it would only be for a few days, but not having access to it illustrated how my backups work the same as if the laptop got stolen or something else would’ve happened to it.

problems

There ended up being a few more or less obvious problems, some that should’ve been on my radar.

To become productive again at uni I had to decide what to use instead of my t470 that I lost access to. The options were an 2012 thinkpad x220 or an m1 macbook.

I mostly ended up using the x200 over the mac because of the operating system and it feeling much more closer to my main system.

Here a table to illustrate the points important to me in the decision:

software..

..that broke

Using nixos on the main host it was obviously easy to reconstruct on the x220…

…given it was configured correctly.

There were three programs that I did not have configured correctly. Those were the following.

1. xournalpp : (Nix) home-manager’s home.file for some reason didn’t work correctly lately with my xournalpp config – specifically for an plugin I’ve written for hotkeys[^0] – so for the time being it was just put into .config by hand. Making it not be built by nix.

2. PFERD : PFERD is a scraper for my university’s web system, it’s a huge barely usable mess of php and it allows one to just have a local copy to not interact with it.
   It too was only put into .config by hand. More importantly it contains credentials. So I can’t just use nix to write that file from my nixos options (which are in a public repo) to .config. Also I can’t just use sops nix which I already use in other parts of my nix config for the secret management, but would’ve to instead use a whole different way to input credentials with PFERD.

Haven’t figured that out yet, but at least I’m aware I need to fix it some time soon.

3. mail : At the time of writing this I use a mix of Thunderbird and Neomutt. Thunderbird to have all my accounts at one place and Neomutt to write / reply long mails that could use more than one window to go through, in Neovim.

The problem is that although neomutt is put in nix very well with the respective configs using sops as secret management, Thunderbird isn’t. My calender and 3 mail accounts are in thunderbird and none of them I have put anyhow into nix, that way every reinstall I have to set all that up again.

4. syncthing : If not familiar syncthing just syncs files between hosts. The error I made here was that I used my t470 as main host, creating a star-graph-like structure in which my files were synced along the edges.

Then the node in the middle missing meant that none of the other nodes were able to sync their files anyhow.

My plan to fix that includes me using a local raspberry pi as main host/server instead with which all hosts communicate, such that I don’t have to worry about any other host missing.

..that worked reliably

The parts that I myself saw as essential or primary did work. Them being nixOS to back up the system site and borg for everything under /home¹.

With borg I was able to access the backups hourly of the last 24 hours and with the most recent one got to every file that I could’ve missed or needed.

Nixos allowed me to still use my configured neomutt, nvim, git, VM, etc. and worked on the x220 exactly like it would’ve on the t470.

conclusion

Overall I’m fine with having forgotten the laptop somewhere for a bit to figure those problems out. If I’ll find some time in the next weeks then I’ll fix the problems I’ve found.

this post should encourage you to make sure your system is backed up.