Category: Linux

Why Terminal Session Persistence Matters

Imagine this: you SSH into your server to launch a data backup that takes a couple of hours. Halfway through, your internet connection drops — and with it, the SSH session. When you reconnect, the process is gone. You have to start all over again, wasting time and resources.

By default, the terminal session and any running processes are tightly coupled to your SSH connection. Once it closes, the shell exits, and any foreground (and sometimes background) jobs are terminated unless special steps were taken.

This behavior is a real pain point for developers, system administrators, and anyone managing remote Linux systems. Fortunately, there are tools designed to help you keep processes alive independently of your SSH connection. Two popular approaches are:

• disown: a shell command to disassociate a job from the current session.
• tmux: a full-featured terminal multiplexer that lets you detach and reattach to entire sessions.

In the next sections, we’ll take a closer look at how these tools work — and why tmux is usually the better long-term solution.

Understanding disown: Minimalist Lifeline

The disown command is a built-in feature of many shells like bash and zsh. It’s a way to prevent background jobs from being terminated when you log out or your SSH session disconnects.

How it works:

• Start a long-running command in the background:

some-command &

• List the current jobs:

jobs

Use disown to remove the job from the shell’s job table:

disown %1

Once disowned, the process keeps running even after you disconnect.

Pros:

• No need to install anything.
• Simple and fast for occasional use.

Cons:

• No way to reattach to the process’s output later.
• Easy to forget to use disown before disconnecting.
• No session management — if something breaks, you’re in the dark.

Enter tmux: Your Persistent Terminal Powerhouse

Pre-installed on some distros:

• Minimal server-focused distros (e.g., Ubuntu Server, CentOS minimal, Debian netinst) usually do not include it by default.

 
Easily installable:

On Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt install tmux

On Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora:

sudo dnf install tmux

On Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S tmux

On Mac OS (brew setup necessary):

brew install tmux

While tmux isn’t always pre-installed, it’s just one command away on almost every Linux system — making it a no-brainer for anyone managing long-lived shell tasks

• Start a new tmux session (name it e.g. rclone):

tmux new -s rclone

• Detach from tmux (keep it running in background), press:

Ctrl-b d

• Later: Resume the session (from any new/existing session!)

tmux attach -t rclone

Use-Case Comparison: disown vs tmux  in Action

Scenario	disown	tmux
Start a long backup and disconnect safely	✅ Yes, if disown is used before logout.	✅ Yes, and you can reattach anytime.
Check logs or output later	❌ No way to view command output after disconnection.	✅ Full scrollback and live output available.
Run multiple commands in parallel	⚠️ Doable with background jobs, but hard to manage.	✅ Multiple panes, windows, and sessions.
Reconnect after an accidental disconnect	❌ Job might be lost if not disowned.	✅ Reattach seamlessly and resume work.
Interactive tools (editors, htop, etc.)	❌ Won’t survive logout or disconnection.	✅ Perfectly supported — keep your editor open!
Scriptable and automatable	❌ Very limited.	✅ Can be scripted, logged, and configured.
Learning curve	✅ Minimal.	⚠️ Slightly steeper, but worth it.

Verdict:

Use disown if you’re in a pinch and only need to run one quick command without sticking around.
Use tmux if you care about reliability, multitasking, or seeing what your session was doing when you reconnect.

Ready for tmux ?

In the long run, tmux becomes indispensable — like ssh, once you start using it, you wonder how you lived without it.

In today’s digital age, safeguarding your data is more crucial than ever. With the increasing reliance on cloud storage, it’s essential to have a robust backup strategy in place. This blog post will guide you through automating your cloud backups (like Onedrive in this example) using rclone and Duplicati on a Linux system (in my case Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS).

Why rclone and Duplicati?

• rclone: A versatile command-line tool (inspired by rsync) that supports various cloud storage providers, including OneDrive. It allows you to sync, copy, and mount cloud storage as if it were a local filesystem.
• Duplicati: An open-source backup solution that offers incremental backups, encryption, and scheduling. It’s designed to work efficiently with cloud storage, making it an ideal choice for automated backups.

We’ll use rclone to mount your OneDrive folder as a local directory seamlessly. This setup allows Duplicati to perform smart incremental backups, ensuring your data is securely backed up without unnecessary duplication. In this guide, I’ll walk you through the steps to set up rclone and Duplicati, making sure your cloud storage is backed up efficiently and securely. Let’s get started!

Install rclone

This command downloads and runs the installation script for rclone, making it easy to install on most Unix-like systems, including Linux and macOS. For Windows, you can download the executable from the rclone website.

run apt install rclone

apt install rclone
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  rclone
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 21.4 MB of archives.
After this operation, 65.9 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://packages.azlux.fr/debian bookworm/main arm64 rclone arm64 1.68.2 [21.4 MB]
Fetched 21.4 MB in 2s (10.2 MB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package rclone.
(Reading database ... 133411 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../rclone_1.68.2_arm64.deb ...
Unpacking rclone (1.68.2) ...
Setting up rclone (1.68.2) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.12.0-4build2) ...

Install Duplicati

The install-process of Duplicati is already explained here.

By default, rclone uses a shared Client ID and Key when communicating with OneDrive, unless a custom client_id is specified in the configuration. This means that all rclone users share the same default Client ID for their requests. This is everything but not optimal, also throttling usually occurs.

Setup rclone

This section guides you through the steps to configure rclone to mount your OneDrive folder to use this mount point as the source for  Duplicati backups.

run rclone config and answer the questions

Example output (Ubuntu 24.04)

rclone config
2024/12/17 11:06:25 NOTICE: Config file "/root/.config/rclone/rclone.conf" not found - using defaults
No remotes found, make a new one?
n) New remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
n/s/q> n

Enter name for new remote.
name> onedrive
Option Storage.
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value.
35 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ (onedrive)
Storage> 35
Option client_id.
OAuth Client Id.
Leave blank normally.
Enter a value. Press Enter to leave empty.
client_id>

Option client_id.
OAuth Client Id.
Leave blank normally.
Enter a value. Press Enter to leave empty.
client_id>

Option client_secret.
OAuth Client Secret.
Leave blank normally.
Enter a value. Press Enter to leave empty.
client_secret>

Option region.
Choose national cloud region for OneDrive.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value of type string.
Press Enter for the default (global).
 1 / Microsoft Cloud Global
   \ (global)
 2 / Microsoft Cloud for US Government
   \ (us)
 3 / Microsoft Cloud Germany
   \ (de)
 4 / Azure and Office 365 operated by Vnet Group in China
   \ (cn)
region> 1

Edit advanced config?
y) Yes
n) No (default)
y/n>n
Use web browser to automatically authenticate rclone with remote?
 * Say Y if the machine running rclone has a web browser you can use
 * Say N if running rclone on a (remote) machine without web browser access
If not sure try Y. If Y failed, try N.

y) Yes (default)
n) No
y/n> n
Option config_token.
For this to work, you will need rclone available on a machine that has
a web browser available.
For more help and alternate methods see: https://rclone.org/remote_setup/
Execute the following on the machine with the web browser (same rclone
version recommended):
	rclone authorize "onedrive"
Then paste the result.
Enter a value.
config_token>

for Use web browser to automatically authenticate rclone with remote?:
Choose “Yes” if your host supports a GUI.
In my case I have to answer this question with no and have to jump on an GUI-equipped host running the same clone-version to generate the needed one drive-token with the command: rclone authorize "onedrive"

{"access_token":"EwCIA8blablaadv!0","expiry":"202blabla.927609745Z"}

Option config_type.
Type of connection
Choose a number from below, or type in an existing value of type string.
Press Enter for the default (onedrive).
 1 / OneDrive Personal or Business
   \ (onedrive)
 2 / Root Sharepoint site
   \ (sharepoint)
   / Sharepoint site name or URL
 3 | E.g. mysite or https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/mysite
   \ (url)
 4 / Search for a Sharepoint site
   \ (search)
 5 / Type in driveID (advanced)
   \ (driveid)
 6 / Type in SiteID (advanced)
   \ (siteid)
   / Sharepoint server-relative path (advanced)
 7 | E.g. /teams/hr
   \ (path)
config_type> 1
vblabla+g0","expiry":"202blabla27609745Z"}

Option config_type.
Type of connection
Choose a number from below, or type in an existing value of type string.
Press Enter for the default (onedrive).
 1 / OneDrive Personal or Business
   \ (onedrive)
 2 / Root Sharepoint site
   \ (sharepoint)
   / Sharepoint site name or URL
 3 | E.g. mysite or https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/mysite
   \ (url)
 4 / Search for a Sharepoint site
   \ (search)
 5 / Type in driveID (advanced)
   \ (driveid)
 6 / Type in SiteID (advanced)
   \ (siteid)
   / Sharepoint server-relative path (advanced)
 7 | E.g. /teams/hr
   \ (path)
config_type> 1

Option config_driveid.
Select drive you want to use
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value of type string.
Press Enter for the default (7bla49295c6fb0).
 1 /  (personal)
   \ (7blae49295c6fb0)
config_driveid>

Drive OK?

Found drive "root" of type "personal"
URL: https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=07bla49295c6fb0

y) Yes (default)
n) No
y/n>

Configuration complete.
Options:
- type: onedrive
- token: {"access_token":"EwCIblabla==","token_type":"Bearer","refresh_token":"K.Abla1.0.U.-CsblaFy55aAHgafDLr5t0","expiry":"202blabla609745Z"}
- drive_id: 79blabla95c6fb0
- drive_type: personal
Keep this "onedrive" remote?
y) Yes this is OK (default)
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d>

Current remotes:

Name                 Type
====                 ====
onedrive             onedrive

Now we can mount the onedrive-storage-folder as a mount-point.
In this example I use /mnt/onedrive as the mount-point (the folder /mnt/onedrive must be present prior executing the mount command):

rclone mount onedrive:/ /mnt/onedrive

Let’s create an rclone-service to mount the one drive-folder at startup:

vi /etc/systemd/system/rclonemount.service

[Unit]
Description=rclonemount
AssertPathIsDirectory=/mnt/onedrive
After=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/rclone mount \
        --config=/root/.config/rclone/rclone.conf \
        --vfs-cache-mode writes \
        onedrive: /mnt/onedrive
ExecStop=/bin/fusermount -u /mnt/onedrive
Restart=always
RestartSec=10

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Start and test the created rclonemount.service:

systemctl start rclonemount

┌──$(root㉿raspi24)-[/]
└─# systemctl status rclonemount
● rclonemount.service - rclonemount
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/rclonemount.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Tue 2024-12-17 16:33:29 CET; 1 week 5 days ago
   Main PID: 1039 (rclone)
      Tasks: 12 (limit: 8674)
     Memory: 68.4M (peak: 131.5M)
        CPU: 15min 9.054s
     CGroup: /system.slice/rclonemount.service
             └─1039 /usr/bin/rclone mount --config=/root/.config/rclone/rclone.conf --vfs-cache-mode writes onedrive: /mnt/onedrive

run rclonemount.service at startup:

systemctl enable rclonemount

┌──$(root㉿raspi24)-[/]
└─# systemctl enable rclonemount
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/default.target.wants/rclonemount.service → /etc/systemd/system/rclonemount.service.

With Duplicati we can create now a new Backup-Job using the source directory /mnt/onedrive, or any specific subfolder like /mnt/onedrive/important_data.

Onedrive can now be backed up fully automatically with a smart backup solution 🙂

As we wrap up our journey with rclone, it’s clear that this powerful tool can significantly streamline your data management tasks. Whether you’re syncing files across multiple cloud services, automating backups, or simply exploring new ways to enhance your workflow, rclone offers a versatile and reliable solution.

Remember, the key to mastering rclone—or any tool—is practice and experimentation. Don’t hesitate to dive into the documentation, explore the various commands, and tailor rclone to fit your unique needs. The possibilities are vast, and the more you experiment, the more you’ll discover the true potential of this remarkable tool.