What is the best way to back up as much as possible of Debian 12 on my laptop to a server that has SSH available? I am currently backing up my users /home/<homedir> folder, but I would like to be able to nuke and restore the system from a backup.
I have ventoy on an external drive if that helps any.
P.S. I would like to be able to do incremental backups too.
The standard answer: don’t backup the system, automate its deployment instead. Backup only data.
Even for a home system? Not a fleet of data center servers. I am currently using rsync to backup /home/<<user>>/ to the ssh server. I tend to make a lot of changes to the base Debian/KDE install.
What kind of changes? Package installation, removal and configuration? Use
apt-mark showmanualto save list of manually installed packages,dpkg --get-selections | grep 'deinstall$'to save list of removed packages,debconf --get-selectionsto save debconf package settings, backup files that you edited in/etc. This should be enough for restoration, wouldn’t take a long time for backup and avoid risk of filesystem inconsistency.