When I researched this previously I concluded that there are two very good options for regular backups: Borg and Restic. These are especially efficient at backing up a diff of what has changed since the last backup. So you get snapshots of your filesystem state at each backup point without using a huge amount of space. You can mount any snapshot as a virtual directory. After the initial backup, incremental backups take a minute or two.
I use Borg, and I back up to cloud storage on Borgbase. I use Vorta as a GUI for Borg. I have Vorta start automatically when I start my window manager, and I have it set up for daily backups. I set up the same thing on my kid’s computer.
I back up my home directory. I have some excluded directories like ~/.cache
, and Steam’s data directory. I use Baobab to find large directories that I don’t want backed up.
I use the “exclude caches” option in the Borg “create archive” settings. That automatically excludes Rust target/
directories because they follow the Cache Directory Tagging Specification. Not all programming languages’ tooling follows that spec so I also use directory name pattern excludes. For example I have an exclude pattern for .*/node_modules/.*
I use NixOS, and I keep my system config in a git repo so I don’t need backups for anything outside my home directory.
It looks like there is a playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-cwa6ZvflaDvviwm8JqO6hZ9W-fhG48c&si=SLCAv2EqJ_jRC9fj