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OS Backup - what should and what should not be backup'd? (lemmy.kde.social)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Hello there! Here's the thing: I got some old HDD for my Debian home server, and now that I have plenty of disk space I want to keep a backup of the OS, so that if something accidentally breaks (either SW or HW) I can quickly fix it.

now the question is: which directory should I include and which should I exclude from the backup? I use docker a lot, is there any docker-specific directory that I should back up?

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[–] 1 point 1 year ago

I have used a combination of rsync and borg to backup to an external drive. Then I was feeling adventurous and tried borgbackup2. It was a mistake. Then I learned of rdiff-backup. Easy to setup, but even incremental backups of my home dir took many hours to complete. This is no solution to have regular backups for me.

I decided to go with btrfs snapshots instead. I recently reinstalled everything and I have finally btrfs. I bought a new external NVME drive for my backups where all the snapshots will go. Btrfs has even a parent-option to copy incremental snapshots to another filesystem (the parent snapshots being on both filesystems).

I did not finish my setup, so I cannot share any scripts yet.

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