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Re:Kopia – incremental backups, encryption, compression, dat... by prmoustache on Saturday March 11, 2023 @09:08AM (#35108373)
It takes 20minutes to reinstall an OS these days, and only 2 to boot a livecd from which you can start working if you need a system asap.

It is rare that you need all your apps installed and configured at the minute 0 in most people situations.

I contemplated using puppet or ansible a long time ago but realized later on that just synching the output of your package manager list (rpm -qa) + all your .config files in a repo combined + having all my ssh keys in a password manager was enough to reconstruct a system very quickly without the need of imaging.

Re:Kopia – incremental backups, encryption, compression, dat... by FloatArtifact on Saturday March 11, 2023 @11:42AM (#35109983)
You're right installing an OS is very fast and that's not the problem.

It's rare that people don't need their applications installed and configured after a recovery?

I completely disagree in this respect for a desktop OS with applications. People want their system exactly how it was before a catastrophic event. When do they want it? As soon as possible.

They don't always remember how it was configured but just expect the end result to be as it was before a recovery.

Using tools like Puppet and Ansible are needlessly complex for the everyday end user when a simple system restore from an image can get them back up and running.