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!
Some suggestions:
Step 1:
rsync has a
-xflag that stops it from crossing filesystem boundaries. I find it quite useful so that I don't have to manually exclude all these directories with mounted pseudo filesystems and whatnot. Alternatively, you can also do a second mount of the filesystem you want to backup in a more convenient location than/, and run your rsync from there.If you want to be fancy, you can also use rsync's
--link-destoption to maintain different versions of your backup, so that you can go a bit further back in time. Using this option rsync creates hardlinks for files that are unchanged between the current backup and the previous one, and you can have multiple backups without much storage overhead and while still keeping the backup incremental and speedy.Step 3:
Reflector comes with a weekly timer preinstalled. You can enable it with
systemctl enable reflector.timerand then just edit the config file to your preferred settings.Alternatively, it also has a service that you can enable so that it runs at boot time, but that doesn't work for one of my systems that is using wifi. For some reason it runs before the network is truly available and returns an error. On my ethernet connected system, I don't have that issue.
Step 4:
Instead of vacuuming your journal manually, you can also set limits in
/etc/systemd/journald.conf. I just setSystemMaxUseto something sensible like 512M, so I don't ever have to worry about my journal overflowing my disk.Step 5:
I just automate the paccache stuff with a simple cron.weekly entry. You may also want to look into where yay caches its packages.