Nine

MacOS, nearly everyone who does anything with development or ops is using a MacBook. Though lately more “normal” employees have been getting MacBooks too.

Waaaaay better.

Restic allows you to make dedupe snapshots of your data. Everything is there and it’s damn hard to loose anything. I use backblaze b2 as my long term end point / offsite… some will use AWS glacier. But you don’t have to use any cloud services. You can just have a restic repository on some external drives. That’s what I use for my second copy of things. I also will do an annual backup to a hard disk that I leave with a friend for a second offsite copy.

I’ve been backing up all of my stuff like this for years now. I used to use BORG which is another great tool. But restic is more flexible with allowing multiple systems to use a single repository and has native support for things like B2 that BORG doesn’t.

We also use restic to backup control nodes for some of supercomputing clusters I manage. It’s that rock solid imho.

Yeah that was my thoughts too. It’s not like it can’t be bypassed but it’s not “easy.” This is kinda how I see it going for commercial 3D printers. It’s not a bad thing either. I’ve always been a fan of making people earn dangerous knowledge & skills. Even in fictional universes like Star Trek there’s restrictions on using a replicator to make weapons.

So it’s not unreasonable, imho, to put some kind of guard rails up that force people to actively bypass restrictions in making weapons.

The trick will be telling the difference between making a nerf gun, action figure guns, and an actual weapon. That I don’t see being possible at this time. Too many edge cases that don’t neatly fit.

To be honest, there’s a few good comments linking to scripts and methods here to batch convert them on a windows pc/vm. That’s the best way to go.

To add on to their comments. If you’re just interested in preserving them then maybe printing them to pdf, specifically pdf/a, would be my approach once you got them opened.

I’ll leave this one here for someone:

You can tunnel L2 over OpenVPN. Just bridge your interfaces in both sides and it works.

That way if you need to provision a VOIP phone or just have something NetBoot remotely. Not that I recommend doing that…

Restic

Like everyone has said there’s way better ways of doing it.

HOWEVER if you wanted to use dd you totally could. I’d recommend piping into something like gzip/zstd to save some space though.

dd if=/dev/sda | gzip >/mnt/backup_disk/sda.gz

You could also use restic backup the raw block device too.

That being said, clonezilla is exactly what you want