What is the best way to back up as much as possible of Debian 12 on my laptop to a server that has SSH available? I am currently backing up my users /home/<homedir> folder, but I would like to be able to nuke and restore the system from a backup.

I have ventoy on an external drive if that helps any.

P.S. I would like to be able to do incremental backups too.

  • waspentalive@lemmy.mlOP
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    5 months ago

    Even for a home system? Not a fleet of data center servers. I am currently using rsync to backup /home/<<user>>/ to the ssh server. I tend to make a lot of changes to the base Debian/KDE install.

    • mipadaitu@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Yeah, it’s worth it to just start fresh. Keep your user data, nuke the rest and setup from scratch w/automation if it’s extremely customized to your liking.

      I personally try to use the default config as much as possible so there’s not as much to set up after installing from ISO.

    • gencha@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      There will always be gaps, but describing your machine through Ansible is worth it and can be fun if you’re into that sort of thing.

      The first time I set up a freshly installed Debian laptop from my existing Ansible roles was a really enjoyable moment.

      Being able to establish a familiar base on a fresh system at will is a far greater power than pure config/data backups.

    • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      What kind of changes? Package installation, removal and configuration? Use apt-mark showmanual to save list of manually installed packages, dpkg --get-selections | grep 'deinstall$' to save list of removed packages, debconf --get-selections to save debconf package settings, backup files that you edited in /etc. This should be enough for restoration, wouldn’t take a long time for backup and avoid risk of filesystem inconsistency.

    • xordos
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      5 months ago

      You mentioned rsync, then take a look rsnapshot if you haven’t yet. It is based on rsync and doing incremental backup very well.