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.
Yeah, it’s worth it to just start fresh. Keep your user data, nuke the rest and setup from scratch w/automation if it’s extremely customized to your liking.
I personally try to use the default config as much as possible so there’s not as much to set up after installing from ISO.