June Meeting Notes

[acjo...@pcdomain.com]

Meeting notes from June 2021 meeting
Topic: Backup solutions for Linux
Presentation: Borg

Chris presented today on Borg which is a backup solution that is a rather flexible and modern backup solution for Linux or Posix systems.

Borg has the ability to backup files to remote destinations using deduplication, compression and encryption
It has the ability to deduplicate your backups which means your backups will take up less space and will require less time and cpu usage to complete!

You can store your backups on a remote system that has ssh enabled, similar to how rsync works, and optionally (but recommended) to install borg-server to enable a more robust and faster backup experience.

Also noteworthy Borg will work on WSL2 giving it the ability to provide effective backups for Windows.

Chris touched on some of the pros and cons and focused on some shortcomings of Borg by itself vs using Bortmatic, especially when it comes to backing up databases specifically.

To solve the database backup shortcomings Chris is using Borgmatic which appears to be the answer to the question, how do I backup my database with Borg and avoid having to write database specific dump scripts?

Borgmatic is essentially a wrapper for Borg and is yaml driven so instead of writing scripts to run Borg from you can just write a yaml manifest.

There are several options for borg backup remote locations, but Chris recommends Borg Base which is a Borg supported Cloud Storage solution that has flexible pricing.

Borg base seems to be a good value when compared to other cloud storage solutions.

In his slides he included a full stack installation example which is useful for anyone new to Borg or Borgmatic.

Next he conducted a live demo over ssh to show off Borgmatic and the simplistic yaml configuration as well as its CLI.

CLI commands you can run are very simple such as:
borgmatic info
borgmatic list
borgmatic extract
borgmatic mount

The commands seem very similar to the vanilla Borg cli commands

Next Presentation: WSL2 with x11 by Devon

We had some more time at the end so Devon stepped up and presented some interesting and new WSL2 x11 features. Thanks Devon!

The first app we saw running on WSL2 surprisingly was Microsoft Edge, don't be confused, it was a Linux app running on Windows, written by Microsoft.

Next he installed wine on his WSL2 instance and was able to launch wine notepad :greatsuccess: :donotwant:

Thanks to everyone who joined and helped make this QCLUG meeting a success!