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.

  • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
    101·
    6 months ago

    The standard answer: don’t backup the system, automate its deployment instead. Backup only data.

    • waspentalive@lemmy.mlOP
      3·
      6 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.worldEnglish
        41·
        6 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
        2·
        6 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.

      • xordos@lonestarlemmy.mooo.com
        1·
        6 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.

      • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
        1·
        6 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.

  • everett@lemmy.ml
    4·
    6 months ago

    Ignoring the whole debate about whether to include system files in your backup, rdiff-backup sounds a lot like what you want. It stores your latest backup as plain files on-disk just like rsync, checks the box for incremental backups (older versions of files are stored as diffs, which you can easily browse with rdiff-backup-fs) and isn’t much different to use than rsync. That said, people will point out that you can make rsync do pretty much the same stuff using hard linking.

  • peasntanks@lemmy.ml
    2·
    6 months ago

    Relax And Recover for os level backups. https://relax-and-recover.org/

    With rear you can back up your system to pretty much anything. Mounted volume, USB drive, even to a bootable iso.

    I use weekly rear backups for my system, and hourly Borg backups for diffs/point in time restore of user data, but you could use rear for an entire system snapshot as well.

  • frizop@lemmy.world
    1·
    6 months ago

    no calls for restic? I use restic and a s3 layer on the other end, be it either backblaze/wasabi/s3/whatever for remote or minio/garage for local object storage. Stuff just works, then I write a systemd unit file to back it up according to whatever schedule I want for both a local target and a remote target. Helps to solve the 3-2-1 backup strategy this way. Good luck!

  • Anna@lemmy.ml
    14·
    6 months ago

    dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=5M --status=progress

    Just don’t mix up a and b otherwise you’re truly screwed.