this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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Not OP but:
Separate the system and home partition, first of all. The strategies are usually different.
Many distros integrate Timeshift out of the box to create system partition snapshots before every update, and to be able to restore them from the boot menu. Using BTRFS for the system partition makes this even better.
This is usually all that people need in regards to the system, but you can also take regular backups (see below) of things like /etc, the list of installed packages and things like that.
For personal files I prefer Borg Backup because it is incremental, does compression, deduplication, encryption, checksums & recovery.
Borg works with repositories, which can be on local disk, on a removable disk, or remote. If remote, they are tunneled over SSH. It can also export/import tarballs for more exotic scenarios like moving snapshots between different repositories or backing up data to optical discs.
You can use Borg from the CLI and there are also UI apps that make it easier. Pika Backup is a simpler one, Vorta is a more advanced one. I've set up family members with Pika and after preparing it for them all they have to do is plug in the backup HDD, open Pika, and hit the big "backup now" button.
There are also online services that support Borg repositories specifically, and for anything that doesn't you can export tarballs and back them up as regular files, completely transparently from the service.
rcloneis a cli tool that supports a large number of online storage services. You can use it with borg snapshots or you can use it to back up your files directly — it resembles rsync somewhat and can also do encryption iirc.Good writeup.
But why separate /home?
I get that it makes it easy to just grab the home partition in full, but grabbing just your own home folder isn't any more difficult than grabbing a home partition.
And it makes it really fucking annoying to manage storage between / and /home. You have to pick how much disk space you want for your own things and how much you want for installing things, and changing it later is a giant PIA. The one time I did it I kept running out of space on one or the other.
Separate root fs makes it easier for timeshift. Snapshots are a different beast from backups.
Also makes it easy to install another distro and pick up where you left off with the old home.
If you alocate 50-60 GB for system it should be ok. Things like Flatpak or Steam can put their files in home.
How? I use timeshift. I don't see what you mean.
Sure, but how often do you distrohop? Not worth the trouble to have to potentielly mess with partitions during everyday use.
When I do reinstall, I've just copied my home folder over to a secondary drive, then back again.
That's the entire boot drive on some of my machines. Not to mention that I have gone well beyond that for root on some systems. You just can't know the numbers in advance, and when you want to just use a system for something, it's really annoying to have extra steps.
Making home a separate partition makes it really hard to use the full capacity of the drive, should you need to. Which people do need to do sometimes, even if only temporarily.
Doing this might make sense if you have terabytes of storage to throw around, enough to never fill any of your volumes. It has benefits, but not enough to make it good advice across the board, which is why I question it.
I don’t see real advantages for partitioning this way that outweigh the negatives - for desktop usage. For servers having separate home (and/or other dirs) partitions is great, as user fluff won’t kill the ability tor ‘more important processes’ to store stuff. If everything is kept on a single partition, the user is essentially able to DoS the system by filling up space.
There's etckeeper too.
Btw, etc is for system/default settings.