What will happen if I include home folder in timeshift?

General system
1

I was setting up timeshift and what to choose? Both root and home folder all files included or only root folder? How much space it will take if I include home folder?

2

Well, including the home folder is up to you but there is a possibility of getting your files replaced by an older version of the same file. Mainly the files you use for work or any saved images. The best is to include the hidden folders of the home folder and use a cloud service or any other physical backup to keep your files backed up.

I have included the root folder though which helped me to come back from some bad stuff I did to my syste.

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3

Timeshift is not primarily designed to be a “backup” tool. It is intended to take snapshots of the system/root filesystem to be restored later to a previous state.

Including /home in the snapshots and restoring an snapshot at a later stage will overwrite files, folders and configs (that has been changed in the meantime) stored under /home. That is probably not something you want.

Timeshift is similar to applications like rsnapshot, BackInTime and TimeVault but with different goals. It is designed to protect only system files and settings. User files such as documents, pictures and music are excluded. This ensures that your files remains unchanged when you restore your system to an earlier date. If you need a tool to backup your documents and files please take a look at the excellent BackInTime application which is more configurable and provides options for saving user files.
:eye: https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift

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4

You can include the dotfiles (including .config), if you don’t mind these getting overwritten when you restore a snapshot.

Including personal files like documents and pictures in a Timeshift snapshot is a terrible idea, for the reason @pebcak mentioned.

Imagine you’re writing anime fanfiction, and today was a nice, productive day and you wrote 20 pages! Now you update your system and mess something up. No problem, you have a timeshift snapshot, so you restore it. Oh no, the 20 pages you wrote today are gone, because you were foolish and included /home in your timeshift snapshot.

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