in reply to Nooo!... Have I trashed my Strawberry?

I did something bad. I configured the MSI installer to unpack Strawberry over my existing Strawberry installation.

Deja vu: Strawberry Perl, from 5.18 to 5.22

That leaves one question: If your Strawberry installation has some value for you, why don't you have a backup? And what about the other data on your computer? Do you care about it?

Getting your data backed up is not that hard. I currently use UrBackup (free and open source) for Windows machines, it comes with an ISO image for bare metal recovery (from images), but also does file backups. It runs on a Linux machine with sufficient disk space, and only needs a small agent running on the Windows machines.

For unix machines, I use a script running rsync that creates incremental, hardlinked backups. It started as a script downloaded from somewhere on the WWW, but I have rewritten it several times to match my changing needs. Still, it basically does what that old script did:

  1. Mount the backup disk: mount /dev/some-disk /backup
  2. Create a hardlink copy of the previous backup: cp -al /backup/day-1 /backup/day-0
  3. Update the copy to the current state, i.e. create a backup: rsync -axHAXS --delete --numeric-ids /source /backup/day-0
  4. Rotate the backups, deleting the oldest one first:
    1. rm -rf /backup/day-3
    2. mv /backup/day-2 /backup/day-3
    3. mv /backup/day-1 /backup/day-2
    4. mv /backup/day-0 /backup/day-1
  5. Unmount the backup disk: umount /backup

That also works nicely and safely via ssh, so you can create a backup on a remote disk or RAID. Better yet, if you run a bunch of Unix machines and a backup server, you don't need anything but ssh and rsync installed on the Unix machines, the backup server can do the backup by tunneling rsync via ssh. We use exactly that setup at work.

Alexander

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)

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Re^2: Nooo!... Have I trashed my Strawberry?
by afoken (Chancellor) on Jun 11, 2025 at 11:28 UTC

    Deja vu: Strawberry Perl, from 5.18 to 5.22

    That leaves one question: [backup]

    Actually, two questions:

    Why does the strawberry MSI installer allow to overwrite an existing installation?

    I'm too lazy to set up a test environment, but I would at least expect a big fat warning when doing so. If not, that's a bug in the installer. If there is a warning, well, it is not big enough for at least two users.

    The release notes for the current release don't contain a warning. Also, no warnings on the homepage or the support page. And no open issue requesting a warning on the issues page.

    Alexander

    --
    Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)
[reply]
      Alexander said:
      Why does the strawberry MSI installer allow to overwrite an existing installation? I'm too lazy to set up a test environment, but I would at least expect a big fat warning when doing so. If not, that's a bug in the installer (emphasis mine). If there is a warning, well, it is not big enough for at least two users. The release notes for the current release don't contain a warning. Also, no warnings on the homepage or the support page. And no open issue requesting a warning on the issues page.

      I am in vehement agreement with Alexander, as you'd expect. I guess it's just a limitation in the MSI internals that it doesn't detect an existing installation of Strawberry where we are about to install, but somewhere in the web site for Strawberry there should be A WARNING IN CAPS., and I did look at the support page.

      As an aside, I am using berrybrew to manage multiple StrawberryPerl installations now. It's a little weird (overnight my $PATH lost the element pointing to the Strawberry I was using {I swear}). Setting the $PATH requires Admin privileges and that a bit of an inconvenience. But I am repeating what I posted about in another node in this thread, sorry. Anyway, live and learn.

        Soren

      Jun 13, 2025 at 17:08 UTC
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      And no open issue requesting a warning on the issues page.

      Perhaps someone (who cares) might open such an issue ?

      Cheers,
      Rob
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Re^2: Nooo!... Have I trashed my Strawberry?
by Intrepid (Curate) on Jun 12, 2025 at 19:22 UTC

    Good Monk afoken offered the following words:

    That leaves one question: If your Strawberry installation has some value for you, why don't you have a backup? And what about the other data on your computer? Do you care about it?

    Well. I'm going to give this some serious thought. I haven't been in the habit of making backups because it just seemed too troublesome to decide what to back up and how to do it, I suppose. The only form of backup I have been using is the Google Drive service, which has got some good stuff from years past and I'm glad to have it.

    I appreciate the detail you provided about how you do backups, it was very clear.

    never
[reply]
      I haven't been in the habit of making backups because it just seemed too troublesome to decide what to back up and how to do it, I suppose.

      The "how" is easily solved if you have an old (or new) Linux box somewhere. (Urbackup server also runs on other Unixes, and on Windows, but I use it only on Linux servers.) Urbackup does not need a lot of hardware. I run it in a Proxmox container at home, with just 2 GBytes memory, 1 GByte swap, and two CPU cores (2.2 GHz each). At work, it runs on an old HP N36L (2x 1,3 GHz, 8 GByte RAM), together with the rsync backup script for the Linux machines. Backup is done on spinning rust, some single-digit TByte desktop harddisks in a RAID-1 or RAID-5. Just don't buy SMR disks, they suck big time. CMR is fine. SSDs, a fast CPU, and much RAM all don't hurt, but aren't really needed. Urbackup is limited by the available network bandwidth, and it is designed to run in background.

      The "what" is almost as easy. Because at least pre-UEFI PCs need a master boot record and a boot sector, you want an image backup of your bootdisk. You don't need to have it created very often, because MBR and boot sector are usually constant. And you only need two or three images. It's just to start a bare metal restauration, if things have gone really wrong. The real backup are all files on all non-removable disks in your computer, with the exception of the swap file and the hibernation file. Urbackup will create a few full backups and a lot of incremental backups, and it will automatically clean up old backups. You want to keep incremental backups of at least a few weeks, and full backups for a few months. The full backups takes some time (because they are done in background), but the incremental backups are reasonably fast.

      You can tell the Urbackup client to suspend the running backup if you need the full performance of your computer. I do that occasionally when juggling with huge VMs, or when the Urbackup client tries to backup the files that I currently use.

      I have configured Urbackup at home to create an incremental file backup every 24 hours, and a full file backup every 30 days, keeping max. 100 incremental and max. 10 full backups. Incremental image backups run every week, full image backups are disabled, up to 30 incremental and 5 full image backups are kept.

      That sounds like a lot of data, but Urbackup deduplicates the data on disk. My boot disk is 240 GByte, and needs about 320 GByte of backup space for images. Together with the 500 GByte data disk (which is almost full), this fills about 1.5 TByte of backup space for images. Included in the file image backup are several large VMs that modify their hard disk images almost daily, so I guess that my file backup is unusually large. (The VM disk images can't be deduplicated.)

      Alexander

      --
      Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)
[reply]

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