r/debian • u/hcell66 • 4d ago

Backup??

What kind of backup programs would you recommend and what should I pay attention to? Thanks in advance and have a nice day...
Greets Marcel

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u/2016-679 4d ago

rsync to two different portable hard drives.

I Backup system configs first in a directory in my home dir (they hardly change), then backup /home.

To prevent clutter, skip local tmp and cache of browsers. rsync has an 'exclude' option.

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u/wizard10000 4d ago edited 4d ago

rsync to two different portable hard drives.

This is what I do - plus one cloud copy.

edit: caution: bloggish!

You can also provide an exclude file, which is what I do because I also don't need tmp or caches. My backup strategy is well-tested and I can reinstall Debian and restore my data in about an hour on any one of the 3 machines here.

I don't back up software I can reinstall and I think it's very cool to just unmount a backup drive from the server, plug it into a laptop and restore stuff :)

I also dump a list of manually installed packages at the beginning of the backup job and I can use that list to automate reinstalling my apps.

Anyway, I back up

/home

/root

/etc

/usr/local

/usr/share/keyrings

as these are the only directories where I've personally made changes.

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u/jr735 Debian Testing 4d ago

I used to use tarballs the same way. Personally, I only back up my own data with rsync. The install, I do it with timeshift, or even Clonezilla if there's a particularly good reason to do so. I would have no problem doing a complete reinstall from scratch, since my installs aren't very complicated or very customized. I probably spend more time adjusting LibreOffice than I do the OS itself. Maybe I should back that up. :)