It would be much better if #backup software could somehow recognize that it's looking at a #database and do whatever is needed to back it up properly, without needing to be told by the administrator.

Perhaps DBMSes should place a socket with a well-known name in their database directory that, when connected to, causes the DBMS to sync everything and then wait for the backup to finish? Then you can just back up the raw database files. SQLite would need special handling, though.

Do you make backups? Do you run ZFS? Do you use Bacula? Do you use dd?

Your method is important for you. What's also important is testing how a restore works.

I lost a partition less than 30 minutes ago. I have a simple tgz backup of the important data on another drive, not an SSD, no a HDD.

I lost zero bytes of data.

Please make sure your backup and restore systems work.

When your recovery tool says the partition is lost, only your backup will save you.

Mine did

What I'm still missing is a custom #recovery that can actually do any useful stuff (especially full #backup).

My device has recovery as a #ramdisk in vendor_boot, and there are some prebuilt vendor_boot images with #twrp around, which I don't want to use directly because there's also an init-boot ramdisk in there that needs patching for root with #magisk ... and as far as I understood now, these ramdisks are userland only, using the shared #kernel from the boot partition, so it's unlikely a recovery built for #HyperOS1 (#Android 14, #Linux 5) will work with #HyperOS2 (Android 15, Linux 6).

What I *did* try nevertheless was modifying my vendor_boot using Magisk's #magiskboot utility, replacing ONLY the recovery ramdisk. It resulted in #bootloop trying to boot the normal system, so there seems to be something I still don't understand (I *thought* this ramdisk would only ever be loaded when booting to recovery).

For now, I'll live with the useless stock #Xiaomi recovery. Attempting to do my own build of twrp or orangefox really is too much hassle

@zero #backup

@Sheril This is the new reason for demanding backups.

If you don't have backups, what will you do when Trump comes for you?

Is there some magical file system/directory structure that will solve my problems? What tools should I be using? I have heard of Johnny Decimal and ZFS and more tools than I care to remember, but I don't know how to start maintaining my own data and infrastructure in a sustainable way!

https://johnnydecimal.com/