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Teach me how to backup a layered volume (piefed.blahaj.zone)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone to c/techsupport@lemmy.world

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In this economy, I somehow managed to get my hands on a brand new 18TB IronWolf Pro HDD for $500.

I have four 4TB SSDs on top of which I have made a logical volume with lvm, which in turn I encrypted with LUKS. Now, I want to backup everything inside that LUKS container, but I'm a little but unsure of which "layer" to copy or to clone.

Just cp/dd the contents of the LUKS container like I would any other file?
dd the LUKS container itself - in other words, close the container and copy/clone the mapped volume, which is encrypted?
dd the logical LVM volume - in other words, close/"unmap"/whatever the logical volume and dd?
dd the underlying raw disks? Although I don't see how that would be recoverable/usable/readable on the backup HDD.

The data is not critical. It's just some Linux ISOs that would be nice to have backed up so that I don't have to download them again.

Edit: the HDD is to be installed on the same system as the SSDs. The HDD is also going to be encrypted, but without a logical volume, since it has enough space on its own.

Please advise. 😊

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[–] buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

@akunohana if you have a user that can see all of the directories and files within the current system, I would think rsync is the smoothest way to move it across to a completely different file system.

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Thanks! The HDD is to be installed on the same system as the SSDs. The HDD is also going to be encrypted, but without a logical volume, since it has enough space on its own.

I haven't worked muh with rsync, but I guess this is a good opportunity to learn! What's its advantages over dd, which I find plain and simple otherwise?

[–] buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

@akunohana The nice thing about rsync is that it doesn't really trust the connection, which is good even in local copies between hard drives. It means that if something is disrupted it can be continued again.

It's also very nice that --dry-run is an option. I have scripts that use rsync internally and I make sure dry is an option in each.

This seems a nice write-up on it all:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-rsync-to-sync-local-and-remote-directories

[–] buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

@akunohana this is how I do it

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thanks! Judging from this and a quick glance on some tldr entries, it has pretty handy options/switches! :)

[–] buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social 2 points 1 week ago

@akunohana posting my script made me go back and clean it up. Haha.