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.

  • bizdelnick
    1·
    7 months ago

    What kind of changes? Package installation, removal and configuration? Use apt-mark showmanual to save list of manually installed packages, dpkg --get-selections | grep 'deinstall$' to save list of removed packages, debconf --get-selections to 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.