On Sat, Sep 16, 2023 at 6:56 AM Tim via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Sat, 2023-09-16 at 09:17 +0200, Peter Boy wrote:
From the *practical* side, perhaps it would be worth considering whether your use case is the usual and common case - 6-16 GB RAM, 500GB - 1TB disk, regular (hourly) backup, etc.
I would say the *most* usual and common would be no backups made at all.
Windows and macOS both copy user data to cloud servers, so many users new to linux have no experience with backups. Users who create artifacts, including emails, generally store them on a remote server.
I'd also say that *most* people using a computer are only semi-literate about computing. It's gone from only nerds with a keen interest are using computers to virtually everyone is expected to, no matter how little their care about it.
At my former workplace, each user was issued a Windows laptop configured with a personal directory and a shared workgroup direcotory in an enterprise "cloud" . Important content should be placed in the appropriate cloud location. When a laptop has problems that don't have a quick solution, the disk is wiped and a fresh enterprise Windows image is installed.
Backing things up, *and* being able to restore something is far from straight-forward. You really need something external to back up to, it may well be best that it's not another computer with the same OS, since and OS update may be what caused your need to restore files. You need to know how to drive it. How to backup what you need to backup, how to ignore things that don't need backing up that would waste time and space. And you really need to know how to retrieve something specific that you lost, because a simple dump everything you have now in the trash and put back on everything from an hour (or more) ago causes far more loss than the one file you needed to get back.
I think many linux users have ways to keep important content in cloud locations. Backups provide faster recovery if the one and only disk fails, but the user's important content is not at risk.
Problems occur for users who heavily customize the system so there is a lot of work to be done after a fresh OS install. Customizations also make it harder to get help from forums when they introduce problems that don't occur in normal installations.