Yeah, that was me a couple years ago… I’d read some blogs, watched some yoochoobz and had data going from my NAS to Backblaze… encrypted…so… ok… is it restorable? No idea.

the recent influx of so-called ‘immutable’ distros springing up like mushrooms is undeniably linked to and inspired by NixOS.

This is the usual (only?) solution - the idea forks or inspires a different community to take it further.

There’s usually no fixing a toxic person / community in either real life or online.

If you like music have a look at

• Picard
• Puddletag

No, you can jusy restore to a second location…it depends on whether everything was backed up, or just a few test files.

I prefer backing up specific folders rather than “everything”, so it’s easier to test. (I’d just reinstall the OS if that was nuked)

Let’s say I want to do a test restore of all my photos. I just rename that folder to simulate that it’s been accidentally deleted… then I just do a normal restore - and do a bit-by-bit comparison of the two folders and check it all went well.

Also setup a bootable USB stick with a backup program like clonezilla to do full machine backups.

You’ll get the hang of OS vs data backups later, but for now, do a full backup, play around installing / removing stuff and if you break it, you’re back in business in no time

I think the main thing is for you to try doing a test restore of your data before you need to (and you already have a local backup anyway if your test goes wrong)

That will give you a better understanding of the whole process - they might be 100% reliable in storing data which is totally unusable by you because you’ve lost your decryption key, weren’t backing it up correctly, etc (for example).

Ooh, nice, I didn’t know them - thanks!

Thanks, good to know… although I’ll do one other thing first… a full backup with clonezilla first ;)

That’s comforting to know.

I have kinda the opppsite: a machine that isn’t changing it’s hardware, but it hasn’t had updates in ~2 years (due to some issues with an AUR package back then…)

I wonder if it’ll upgrade…?

I’ve kept arch-keyring updating now & again… so it should work, but I know packages change dependencies so, it’ll be an interesting one (ie full backup first)

Do you have any other hardware between computer & monitor? (Ie a KVM Switch?)

The other post about display ID jogged my memory that KVMs (etc) don’t pass through the data (sometimes?), so just wondering whether there’s another factor here…

Not sure how it would only trigger this on updates, but just building a complete picture of the issue.