Just a basic programmer living in California

  • 1 Post
  • 7 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: February 23rd, 2024

help-circle
  • You can do tag-based file management on Linux. Linux filesystems support “extended attributes” or “xattr”. There is some software out there that uses xattr for tagging. I don’t know what the best options are right now for tag-based file management, but I think it exists.

    Looking at what’s out there I see there are also apps that each use their own out-of-band tagging schemes. There’s a CLI, tmsu, and a GUI, TagSpaces. I don’t think these interoperate with each other’s tags.

    Of course those supplement instead of replacing hierarchical organization.

    The talk of hypertext and “escaping paper” makes me think of Obsidian which embraces hyperlinking, tags, and mind mapping via its canvas feature.








  • When I researched this previously I concluded that there are two very good options for regular backups: Borg and Restic. These are especially efficient at backing up a diff of what has changed since the last backup. So you get snapshots of your filesystem state at each backup point without using a huge amount of space. You can mount any snapshot as a virtual directory. After the initial backup, incremental backups take a minute or two.

    I use Borg, and I back up to cloud storage on Borgbase. I use Vorta as a GUI for Borg. I have Vorta start automatically when I start my window manager, and I have it set up for daily backups. I set up the same thing on my kid’s computer.

    I back up my home directory. I have some excluded directories like ~/.cache, and Steam’s data directory. I use Baobab to find large directories that I don’t want backed up.

    I use the “exclude caches” option in the Borg “create archive” settings. That automatically excludes Rust target/ directories because they follow the Cache Directory Tagging Specification. Not all programming languages’ tooling follows that spec so I also use directory name pattern excludes. For example I have an exclude pattern for .*/node_modules/.*

    I use NixOS, and I keep my system config in a git repo so I don’t need backups for anything outside my home directory.