Could you elaborate more on that?
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I just do a weekly backup with deja-dup on each machine. Most file changes are in the BOINC directory slots so they are excluded. I think I looked at timeshift but thought it would be too large a backup to handle with normal sized media. Iāll have to look again. Thanks for the suggestion.
Sorry for the late reply. Evidently the forum software limits newcomers to a max of 14 messages in 24 hours. I exceeded that my first day. The forum would not let me post till today.
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Back to where the machines were before the Software Update. All programs and libraries restored and the machined at full functionality and back to crunching.
The point of being at the tty terminal on a failed boot left me rather dispirited. I though I was going to have to reinstall the entire OS and reinstall all my applications. Thankfully I was able to restore the desktop and display manager and found myself back in my familiar Home directory environment with everything in place.
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i remember doing a couple backups when i first started using ubuntu mate (before i switched to bodhi), but that was back when i was fairly new to linux and never needed it to actually restore anything.
as far as size is concerned with timeshift, my daily use partition only has about 30 gb used. iād say maybe 10 of that is os at most. the external drive where i store my timeshift snapshots died about 6 weeks ago so at present i have 26 dailies on my new hard drive taking up just under 50 gb of space. the very first backup was about 8 gb in size (default is set to just system files, but any directory can be added to the list) and took just under 5 minutes to create (internal hdd to external hdd on usb 3.0). each additional backup also says (when i check properties in file manager) that it is 8 gb, but from what i gather each additional backup after the oldest is mostly symlinks (maybe hardlinks? still not sure i understand these two exactly) with any changes added. i have read other users here who delete older backups and just leave the most recent handful or so. i have the extra space at present so i donāt mind the dailies stacking up. honestly, iām kinda waiting to see if they top out at a certain number and size after 6 months or so.
one of my favorite parts of timeshift so far has been the efficiency. my dailies write in just about a minute. the three or so times i have had to revert take just about 5 minutes from hitting restore to having my desktop (on an hdd) back up and running.
i have never had to recover from a situation as serious as yours, but from what i understand you can run timeshift from a live usb and restore your daily use partition from there. i will leave it at that 
seriously not trying to rep for timeshift. i have just found it to be helpful and well executed.
no worries about the when of things. life happens at the speed of life. my guess is the message limit is to deter some kind of troll or brigade attack. i appreciate you stopping back in to let us know how things turned out.
Symlinks are just a reference to another file, while hard links refer to another file but have a 100% copy of the file, as well.
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thank you for the info. i would imagine that is explained somewhere on the timeshift site or just by understanding rsync. of course a quick search could have probably answered that too 
to me it felt like what you described with borg. i just hadnāt gotten around to that quick search yet.
is a great tool to start with, when it comes to backups or data syncing between 2 places. It has many options and can do what you are saying but it also has other possibilities and methods of file syncing.
If the backup gets so much bigger each update, then itās probably not a deduplicating program. How many GB take all your data on your HDD with your OS installed? If the first backup is the size of your HDDās used space or lower and all future backups are way lower (not more than 1GB per backup, per average user), then it could be a deduplicating program. When using borg, then the results always show how much space the data would take, how much space the compressed data would take and how much space the deduplicated and compressed data is actually taking.
Iām installing Timeshift. I looked at rsync but that was a bit over my head at the time as a beginner. See that rsync is the engine behind Timeshift.
I didnāt realize Timeshift saves just the system files. That would be useful with deja-dup saving my /home directory primarily.
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Before you go on, please have a look at:
I have Clonezilla on USB stick. Only used it for cloning hard drives to SSD so far. Knew it could be used for backing up too. Just never used it that way before.
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I think you should read my post first. 
Timeshift for system, Grsync for Home directoryā¦Its da bomb!
finally took the time to visit the timeshift page today and read:
In RSYNC mode, snapshots are taken using rsync and hard-links. Common files are shared between snapshots which saves disk space.
from here.