Hello, I've got so many individual program config files in my user account, Im thinking it maybe better to backup the whole user home folder. A good idea or no?

Sure, you may just want to exclude some specific folders that store sync'd email accounts, web browser cache, etc. for size reasons.

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You can backup /home, but you should also backup /etc and /var/log for forensic purposes.

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?

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I would add all of /var to that list.
If you use rsync to do the backup, it should be quite quick.

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sorry I didnt mean backup the whole of the /home directory, I meant a specific user folder within the /home directory.

You shouldn't feel the need to apologise, lighter973. Your opening post made it fairly clear what you were talking about (my emphasis):

Just so I'm adding to the conversation, yes, I think that it's a good idea to back up your user's home directory just in case. It's also a good idea, in my opinion, to make regular images of your root, home, data and other partitions (depending on how you've set these up of course) to allow quick "roll-back" in case of system breakdown or infection.

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If you have your operating system on a hard disk drive (hdd), then of course the hdd could die after you've had it for some years.

In that case, it helps to backup the whole /home folder on a newer hdd.
Of course, you can backup to a new solid state drive (ssd) instead. However, an ssd is a lot more expensive.

What I do is to install a full linux operating system (OS) onto a cheap 16gb USB flash drive.
Then backup the /home folder from your hdd onto the OS on the usb flash drive.
This way, if the hdd dies then your /home folder still survives on your cheap flash drive.

Of course, you don't need to install an OS onto the usb.
You can just create several partitions on the usb which will hold newer versions of your /home folder.
This is because you will add/delete stuff in your /home folder each month.

The reason I install a full linux OS onto the usb is because... I have a new OS! I can install different programs, different browsers etc. The distro can even be different!

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No worries here.

Please consider https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/d...p_and_recovery as a generalized guide.

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examples with rsync you can always pass the n opperand for dry run -aAXhvn
and for the ~/.* stuff minus web-browser cache (this one is so so...)
These are assuming the backup drive is mounted in /mnt/somewhere
it generally is a good idea to keep backups.

EDIT:: as also mentioned in thread rsnap, runs something like this (using rsync): establishes a base backup of root that can be incrementally backed-up however, when I've tried the incremental backups tied to the base, they tend to be almost as large as the base so I may have something wrong in the rsync script - had to abandon incremental backups as run out of disk space, in lieu of deleting base backups no longer needed and running the rsync above (new base / backup). This does not backup $home.

I suggest backing up as much as possible. The limiting factor is how much space you have available for your backup files. I backup everything on my main operating system and data partition every day. I backup my secondary operating system and data partition once a week. For both backups I keep three generations of backup. Using rsync, a backup (after the initial backup run) takes about two minutes and while a backup is running I usually browse the Internet in a different desktop.

I have been doing this style of backup for fifty years on a variety of hardware and operating systems and I have never been in the position of trying to scrape the data from a lost file off a hard drive.

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Steve Stites

Oh, at least once.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...kup_with_rsync

Learning and using rsync is always good. For full-system backups, I use and recommend rsnapshot, which uses rsync to build and maintain delta backups as configured. I do daily, weekly, and monthly backups to an off-site server dedicated to that purpose.