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
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    2 months ago

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

    • waspentalive@lemmy.ml
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      2 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.

      • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
        ·
        2 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
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    2 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.

  • data1701d@startrek.website
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    1 month ago

    I would say dd is the best solution for a very complete backup, but I’m also a fan of Borg Backup for incremental backups.

  • peasntanks@lemmy.ml
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    2 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.

  • Anna@lemmy.ml
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    2 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.

    • waspentalive@lemmy.ml
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      30 days ago

      I actually did this **dd if=(running system root volume) of=(local usb attached hard drive file) ** This gives me a full disk backup that would be no worse than if power got yanked. (I know laptops have batteries, for this case we are pretending to be a desktop with no UPS)