I am messy. One thing at a time, and everything else gets ignored.
I put off things I dont enjoy and that includes being tidy.
But I can be incredibly tidy when I want to… like in the computer.
I was only trying to say that there are better things than a drag and drop. Do it that way if it suits you. At least you have a backup copy… some people never make a dual copy of anything.
Not always easy, for some time i taught new users to a mouse, so also taught right click copy paste, or ctrl c, ctrl v…… but going back 25 years now
Drag and drop is not a sensible option IMHO particularly when there are (necessary, essential) hidden system files which will be ignored. If anything, using an rsync script (not difficult for someone with your level of expertise) will make the task so much more effective. There are gui options too for Linux such as Lucky Backup.
This app will work well on your favourite distro as will Timeshift for system elements.
Don’t like to disagree and we all have our preferred method
But cross platform backup restore is not always possible
When I get a machine in to convert windows or mac s to linux I always use a system of copy paste and give the client a disk copy so they have a backup copy which is real and not software dependant
IMHO it works for me
whatever floats your boat in that lovely marina 
I did have one of those zip drives and they were very useful when I provided support for clients. I think I gave it away years ago with a bundle of other old PC stuff to a local computer guy. I doubt it had Linux drivers - I used it on my old Win XP lappie (still buried in a cupboard somewhere).
Hey guys, those questions are far better than you would think - I guess.
There was an incident over here with a family of webpages.
They hosted quite a few pages on their own server.
Of course they did backups regularly, but…
In feburary they upgraded the server with a new CPU.
At some point that CPU got faulty, unfortunately the signs of being faulty was not obvious at first glance.
In july the server completely crashed - at that time it was obvious at least 
Now they can’t stop apologizing, because they lost couple months of data.
As with the faulty CPU the backups were broken, and if that wasn’t enough, even prior backups were ruined.
So they found that what they can really restore is something from april…
At least that’s the story what they told.
So the lesson tells me, the “how do you know you can restore your backup” is a very good, and valid question!!!
So how do you know?
Go and do restore it. Does it work? You can then restore.
Yup, and it doesn’t have to be something mission critical either - a small test folder would do it and done, say monthly, you get used to the routines involved so when something does go wrong, you know intuitively how to do a restore without any panic involved.
There are different types of restore, all the lot is ok if the files structure remains the same, but if its into adifferent folder or sub director or in some cases a different named drive it could fail.
Mainly I just would like the one picture that is unreplacable restore and if dont know what its called or when i took it……
I got an opportunity for a full mission critical restore once . I ruined the disk content in my spare PC playing around with zfs.
I went to my usb backup drive with clonezilla, asked to restore disk image, and it all came back… about a month out of date.
So I am happy that Clonezilla works.
I just use rsync and tar to backup my Pi “servers”… (rsync to copy files and folders elsewhere, tar to create a gzip’d archive file)… And I manually cleanup the archive files - keep one for the first week of each month…
I also use one of those Pi systems as a backup server for Apple TimeMachine (via Samba) backups for two MacBooks…
the above backups all go to a 6 TB USB 3 powered drive plugged into a Pi4 (8 GB)…
I don’t really backup anything else… My docs, scripts and other stuff is shared across multiple computers using ResilioSync… On the machines where I’ve set it to retain deleted files - there’s 30 days worth of stuff to recover from…
Worst backup recovery I’ve encountered was with MS SQL Server. The genius (sic) who setup the backup job (in Arcada / Seagate Backup Exec) decided to just do backups of the tables - but not the schema or indexes! So - we went into disaster recovery and could only recover flat tables! I was able to find another copy of the database with the schema and indexes and use that to generate some SQL to index the flat tables…
Yes, rsync is fine for daily backups of data.
For total disaster protection (like a disk failure) I think some form of imaging of disks or partitions ( like Clonezilla) is needed.
