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In backing up my home directory, I find I have just shy of 30,000 files of the form

filename.odb_counter.odb

my guess is these are the files used to recover corrupted files when they occur. I don't know if they are action-by-action backups or session-by-session backups.

Many of the files are 0 bytes. Most of the files run from .8M to 1M.

What is the downside to excluding these files from the backup, or deleting files that are more than, say, 60 days old from the last time the file was modified?

Thanks, John

2 Answers 2

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filename.odb_counter.odb

Those are backups of changes made to a sheet. Those depend on the version of OO you use.

What is the downside to excluding these files from the backup, or deleting files that are more than, say, 60 days old from the last time the file was modified?

In this case it will be useless to backup. But software could complain that it expects files to be somewhere where they are not. Might be benign, might be fatal (for that software).

Settings are often tied to the version of a software you use so a personal backup should contain only personal files. You are more likely to reinstall a newer version of Ubuntu than to restore a backup. And you can not trust a backup of ./config from an older OS to work on a new OS.

In regards to settings:

Write down what you changed, find the equivalent command line version for that, create a script with all those changes and execute it after installing an OS. That would make it a lot more portable. Works for both a restore and reinstall of an OS. And will also work for a new OS. But you might need to update your script every new LTS :)

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Prioritize on backing up your personal files: documents, personal photo's. This is mandatory backup. These are the files that, once lost, can never be recovered.

Application configuration data is not critical. If it has been deleted, it is recreated. The only reason you may want to backup configuration files is convenience: it allows you to restore the previous configuration more quickly when you need to reinstall the system. Unless you change buttons and menus extensively, there probably is no use in backing up LibreOffice configuration.

Personally, I only back up Local Mail under the .thunderbird folder, my .local/bin folder that contains scripts and the photo database of Shotwell. I do so by moving these folders to folders under "Documents", then symlinking them back to the original location where the app expects them. This way, they are copied along with the backup of my "Documents".

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