Moved. Bought a new desktop. Running Manjaro Stable. So in my wandering life, my entire life is on my laptop. So one way to transfer is to take the M2 out of the laptop , take the Timeshift drive I use for backups on the laptop out of its caddy, put the laptop drive in the caddy, connect it to the desktop and do it that way. So since I have backups of the laptop and since Timeshift on the desktop recognizes the backup drive from the laptop…is there any way to selectively “restore” music,pics, docs and vids from the laptop Timeshift drive to the desktop. I have played with it a bit and I cant find a way that I am comfortable with. Have the desktop set up like I like it and dont want to frag the desktops /home. Thanks.
You should avoid this, because TimeShift isn’t designed for this purpose, and therefore attempting it is very unsafe.
It would be better to use something like Borg.
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Thanks Vidar will look into it.
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If the laptop is your only storage of your entire life, you should also think about a little bit more “professional” storage solution.
Either a NAS in your own network or a cloud based backup. Even an external disk with some versions might be better than having the laptop as only storage device.
Disk failures can occur all the time and i would not rely on a single drive only.
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I am assuming you are having both laptops at hand?
If you connect both laptops to the same network, there is utilities which can transfer the data.
A couple of examples from the repo is nitroshare, warp and warpinator.
They are designed to be simple to use - I never used them - just looked them up in the repo.
Remember: A backup is only a backup if you restore.
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A backup is only a backup if you test the restore frequently 
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I’m not sure about an ‘automated’ restore of those specific folders, I’ve only used the timeshift program itself for a complete restore.
I do know you can just navigate to the backed up home directory via a regular file browser and ctrl+c/ctrl+v the folders and files you want.
It’s my main way of restoring all my home contents when I reinstall my OS.
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Yes, but not automatically. If you mount the drive with the timeshift backup, then you can peruse the directory tree of the backup and selectively restore the directories and files that you want by way of “cp -RPp” as root — this will preserve ownership and permissions.
It’ll probably be quite a bit of work, but it’s perfectly doable.
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Pille- I do Timeshift backups frequently and the backup drive is an M2 external to the laptop…not the best situation in the world but what is extant for now.
Needed transfer is between the laptop(or its external Timeshift drive) and an Lenovo Neo 50Q Gen4. Aside from apartment hunting today have been futzing around with Warpinator On the local network here in the hotel I cant make the machines connect. Possibly after I have moved my local network will permit that.
There isnt any great urgency in any of this. Thanks to all of you for the kindness and help.
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OK, better than no backup.
I am using Syncthing which copies and distributes files over the network through various devices.
If you are going to improve your situation, take a look at Syncthing as well.
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Pille
Agreed with your point. Right now the only network I have is the laptop and a new Lenovo Neo 50Q Ver4. As my getting moved to a permanent location here in Colombia progresses I am going to add another desktop and maybe a storage device or explore cloud. I have some 11K photos saved in RAW mode and with documents&c what I have will eat up close to 700GB quickly.
Same to me, but with almost 30k RAW photos
Overall the data storage is approx 1.5 TB.
All is stored on a QNAP NAS. This is backuped every night (incremental with version control) to an external hard disk connected via network (Proxmox virtual host), and once in a week to a cloud storage provider.
The daily use files are synched via Syncthing to the laptops of me and my wife, especially the files we are sharing (e.g. the keepass DB) to avoid outdated redundancy.
I really love Syncthing after i struggled a lot with understanding and setup how it works. It’s almost realtime and changes are synced within seconds.
It also works on smartphones to backup photos, data etc.
There are other solutions which work similar, but i decided for Syncthing.
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Thanks very much for sharing your solutions!! Sounds excellent. I will look into Syncthing. Contemplating a NAS for backup and for media storage as well of course you do that…particularly when for example, not having photos on the machine except as needed then the eggs are in one basket again so backing the NAS up to an external standalone drive is a solution as well…Will look at Proxmox as well… again many thnaks for sharing solutions…
Regards from Colombia.
Proxmox is a virtual solution for running different machines with different OS. Not really a backup solution.
I have one dedicated machine set up in this environment where a USB hard disk is connected exclusively. This is running the backup over night.
But it can be any other device as well, even a Raspberry PI would do this job.