How to best make a backup of ONLY my home folder?

Linux Mint
1

Today I’m expecting a brand new computer. A Tuxedo computer.

Now, on my current computer I’m running Linux Mint 22.2.

How do I best backup my HOME directory completely, including all the dotfiles and dotdirectories. I’m especially interested in keeping my firefox configuration, but there’s also quite some documents on there I wish to keep.

I’d either need to import it in TuxedoOS or a new install of Linux Mint, depending on how used I got to cinnamon.

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2

I have scripts for creating tarballs, one for the entire $HOME and another for Waterfox and Thunderbird.

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3

I would not use backup, but instead put a usb or external disk connected to your machine then use copy or drag and drop the home folder onto the external device.

Then drag and drop each folder content into your new machine.

Dont personally like backup and restore.

For firefox use export then import on new computer. Not sure what you use on firefox but I am a google user, I just signed in and everything transférer automatically from my phone tablet and my older linux box.

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4

This is what I use to back up my /home directory.

=========================================================================

#This command backs up the entire /home folder to an external SSD
#Could add --exclude ‘.config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser’

rsync -av --exclude ‘.local/share/gvfs-metadata’ --exclude ‘.local/share/Trash’ --exclude ‘.cache’ --exclude ‘snap’ --exclude ‘.config’ /home/don /media/don/AI-300-Backup/AI-300-Backup

echo " "
date
echo " "

=======================================================================

I put this into a BASH script I call “mybackup”, put it somewhere that’s in the PATH, and made it executable.

Because rsync does a differential backup (i.e., only backs up what’s changed since the last backup) the procedure is very quick.

Now and then I erase the backup file on the external SSD and make a fresh copy. (rsync does not by default erase files in the destination drive even though they’ve been erased from the source. That’s why an occasional fresh backup is a good idea.)

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5

Far too much work, IMHO, and rather error-prone.

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6

This is undoubtedly why I prefer complete snapshots over incremental savesets. For me, speed is no issue.

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7

My prefered way. Especially as going from one system to another may use different software or versions. Also If I want just one file or image I can just get that with backup and restore its harder.

We each have our own system of work and prefered methods, mine is old school but never let me down and my first computer job was over 50 years ago and thats what I was told to do for tye same reasons

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8

I use rsync in archive mode.
Every night before I finish I rsync my workfile area to a partition on another disk. It can be any disk, internal or external, even a flash drive, but best not the disk your home directory is on.
It is fast because rsync does not use compression.
You get an exact duplicate of the home filesystem, so it is easy to retrieve one item if you need.

I notice @don.karon does the same thing.
but
@abu prefers snapshots

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