New bits for “old” computers [12]

The Win10PC has got itself a bluetooth keyboard now as well as the wireless mouse it already had. The Logitech K380 bluetooth keyboard works quite well and is nice and compact, it can be used with up to three devices and has a battery life up to 24 months. I had an existing Promate bluetooth receiver that is plugged into one of the USB ports on the back of the computer and which works well with the built in Windows 10 Bluetooth drivers. 
After looking at a lot of backup options I have settled on rdiff-backup as being the best solution for what I want to do, since it will actually produce something that looks more like a mirror, unlike all these deduplicating solutions the weakest feature of which is losing one file chunk can result in losing a lot more than one file. I am now trialling rdiff-backup with a backup set from mainpc to see where I can go with it.

I have also installed Btrfs on my computer so as to be able to compress the backup volume as this is the simplest way of getting more backup data onto a disk. rdiff-backup can do multiple generations of backups with its differencing system, so this is worth looking at, even with two main backup disks. rdiff-backup supports SSH, so I might also have that option to be able to make a backup happen via serverpc as originally I had considered, and even multiple backups per disk.

Other options for transparent compression include OpenZfs, but it is really a bit too complex for me to get my head around, so I will just be using Btrfs for now. After following some tutorials online I got SSH working with passwordless login and immediately realised why I never could get it working with borg. Simply because the borg examples failed to clarify that the command was to be issued on the target rather than the source whereas I thought it would be the other way round. However, as I have determined since, borg isn’t the preferred backup solution for my needs and I am happy with using rdiff-backup. At the moment serverpc is backing up the data from mediapc and after that I will test it doing its own backups.


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