Backup/Restore best practices?

My advice, for what is worth:

  1. Forget about snapshots, Timeshift, stuff like that. You don’t need it. If you break something, fix it, it will be an invaluable experience and you’ll learn about your OS much more than if you just restore a snapshot or reinstall.
  2. Have all important data backed up, ideally multiple times and on external hard drives.

Regarding point 2, I have 4 categories of importance:

Category 4: not important data. It is stuff that would be inconvenient to lose, but not a big deal. Usually stuff like downloaded media: films, tv shows, music that is easy to find. Getting it back would involve downloading it again, that’s it. It’s unlikely that it will ever be unavailable. I don’t back that up. Instead, I have it on dozens of external drives.

Category 3: stuff that is very difficult to replace. Usually rarer media, films, books, music that is difficult to find. I have that backed up on external drives, in at least two copies. I could probably replace it, but it would be a lot of work.

Category 2: stuff that is irreplaceable, and would be quite bad to lose. Original stuff I’ve made, various projects, etc… I have this backed up using Borg backup, in multiple copies on external drives. This is also the stuff that changes a lot, as I work on it, so I like to have several versions backed up, and here data corruption is quite possible, so an incremental backup solution like Borg is important (because I don’t want to backup a corrupted file and destroy the good version).

Category 1: priceless stuff. Like photos of my deceased family members and pets, memories of time long past… Also old finished projects that I am especially proud of. Stuff I couldn’t possibly bare to lose and which doesn’t change at all. In addition to having multiple copies of it on external drives, I also burn it on DVDs and distribute it to multiple family members and friends. Some get encrypted versions of it, the trustworthy ones get a non-encrypted version. But it exists in multiple copies on multiple locations.

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