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.
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.Installing specific things both from the repo and from elsewhere (Minecraft), Minor UI tweaks - move the panel to the left side (wide monitor), Konsole settings for colors, font(dotted zero), font size (bigger), 80x25 window. Probably others but that’s all I remember for now.
User settings are stored in the home directory, so you already have them backed up with rsync. If you didn’t omit dotfiles, of course.