Assuming that I have a pool on an internal disk, how much and what gets written to the boot device? I am wondering about the rate of wear if I boot from a usb stick/key.
The documentation says:
If your install drive fails, sorry but there’s not much that can be done other than a new install.
What is the recommended backup strategy/recovery for the data on the boot device? I want to minimize the time to get from broken boot device to new install matches the old.
Incusos has come a long way really quickly. Hats off. A couple of years ago I started working on and off on my own immutable incus base, using a custom alpinelinux build. When incusos was first announced I didn’t think it would meet my needs any time soon, but it now surpasses what I had by a long way (and reduces my work load).
If you delete the local pool that gets automatically created for you, then pretty little.
The main OS data partition effectively just gets a couple of text files written to for configuration, that is on top of the A/B boot partitions but those are read-only.
But there is still the application, in this case Incus itself which will have some data stored on there too. For Incus, that mostly means the database. That does get written to pretty often on busy systems, but it’s very small, so assuming reasonable wear leveling on that USB stick, you should be fine for quite a while.
What would you say is the recommended way to install incus-os. You provide the installer and the bootable image, but I don’t think I have seen one as being the preferred option.
I’ve asked that question as if there is an easy answer, but I appreciate there are advantages and disadvantages to both, and not everyone will have the same “best way”.
The best place for IncusOS to run is on an NVME drive of at least 512GiB.
While it’s possible to run IncusOS from a removal USB thumb drive, it’s really not recommended as IncusOS does set up a SWAP partition as well as write the Incus database onto that drive, both of which are usually not advisable on low quality meida.
Our minimal install target is 50GiB but that leaves you with no space for the local storage pool where we like to store Incus images, backups, logs as well as offer it for regular instance storage.
Both installable and bootable images are actually the exact same content, the only difference is that the ISO uses a 2048 bytes block size vs 512 bytes for the USB image and that ISOs are generally read-only so effectively forces you down the installation path.
Installation is nothing more than a verbatim copy of the content of the booted media over to the target disk.
So there’s no difference between you booting a server from the ISO and installing to the local NVME drive vs downloading the bootable image and writing it yourself to the same local NVME drive.
Thanks, that is really clear. In that case, I will skip the USB drive. I was going that way because it is what I was doing before with Alpine, but that was running entirely from ram without swap.