Hello. Please critique how I'm updating / maintaining my new Arch installation so I can fix anything I'm doing wrong. This is mostly what I could gather from the Arch wiki tailored to my system. I think I know what I'm doing - but as I've often learned, it's easy to misunderstand or overlook some things.
Step 1: perform an incremental full system backup so I have something to restore if the update borks anything. I've chosen to use the rsync command as laid out on the wiki:
sudo rsync -aAXHv --delete --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found"} / /media/linuxhdd/archrsyncbackup
I have a large hdd mounted as a secondary drive under /media/linuxhdd. It is configured to automatically mount from fstab using uuid. Both my root drive and that hdd are formatted ext4. I'm not using the -S option because I don't think I'll be using virtual machines (I have other hard drives I can make bootable). --delete is used so I maintain one current set of files for restore purposes. This keeps the copying and transfer time to a minimum. (I maintain disk images offline with a different tool - this is simply one local copy for easy restoration purposes)
Step 2: Check the Arch wiki - follow instructions for any manual steps
Step 3: once every 1-2 months, update the mirror list using reflector
sudo reflector --protocol https --verbose --latest 25 --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
This should sort the fastest 25 mirrors into mirrorlist. Remember to use the -Syyu option in step 6 if this step was done
Step 4: Clean the journal
sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=4weeks
This should keep 4 weeks of files.
Step 5: Clean the cache
sudo paccache -r
This should keep no more than 3 versions laying around. Once and a while, I can clean out all uninstalled packages with -ruk0 options instead.
Step 6: Upgrade Arch packages with pacman
sudo pacman -Syu
I need to watch for pacnew and pacsave files and deal with them (although I haven't seen any yet)
Step 7: Review the pacman log
nano /var/log/pacman.log
This should tell me about any warnings, errors, instructions, or other things I need to deal with.
Step 8: Remove Orphans
pacman -Qtdq | sudo pacman -Rns -
This could be recursive and needs to be run more than once. Instead, I'll just run it once every time I update. This should keep things cleaned out.
Step 9: Update AUR packages
Check the build scripts to make sure the package hasn't been taken over and that it won't run anything funny.
yay -Sua
This should update just the AUR packages
Step 10: Remove AUR orphans
yay -Yc
The wiki says this "removes unnecessary dependencies" which I believe means AUR-only orphan packages.
Step 11: Reboot
reboot
Step 12: Update flatpaks from the GUI (Gnome-->Software-->Updates)
Any mistakes? Suggestions?
Thanks!
Maybe it is too late because of your filesystem choice but btrfs snapshots delievers enough security if something goes wrong. Rsync seems like a little bit overhead for updating only There is even a pacman hook that makes pre and post snapshots of your filesystem with snapper. Tldr: most of your steps can be automated with pacman hooks. But if you like it this way its fine
Yup you are 100% correct. I didn’t understand what btrfs brought to the table until i started playing around with backups. What I really need is a snapshot since my backups really are handled differently. I may reformat simply for this reason. (Or I’ll switch things up the next time I break something)
i successfully switched an arch install from ext4 to btrfs.
in my case, i had 2 ssd, so i moved from one to the other, but it should work if you use one of the rsync backups.
what i did was: