[deleted] The classical are /tmp, /run, /var/tmp, /var/log, /var/spool, /var/run, /var/lock
Personally I don't backup /var at all, if you need stuffs under var (like for instance /var/www if you installed a web server for your developments, you know you want to backup it).

Regarding your initial post, many things don't apply for vanilla Solus (i.e: /opt, /usr/local, /var/backups, /var/local, /var/games, /var/mail, /srv, the crontabs things, ...)

Also I find this weird to advise to backup /var/lib there is nothing you want to keep there. You should backup your data, not applications or libraries that can be reinstalled.

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      • Post #9

      kyrios Alrighty! thats a good start!

        Talking about backup, I wonder why timeshift isn't available in Solus.

          I backup /home using restic (https://restic.net) manually about every other day. It first lands on a raspberry with an external hdd. That raspberry rsyncs everything to another raspberry in my dad's house every day and from time to time I rsync it all to an otherwise offline external hdd. That asteroid would have to be quite big to wipe out everything.

          I just do image backups of partitions and drives with clonezilla. No fuck around, not annoying, easy to do and works everytime I need it. For /home stuff simple things like rsync is enough to copy over files to a external drive or something like that.

          I always figured I could just reinstall the OS, and save my personal stuff (backup) from /home. I used to just backup documents, photos, and the like, but I now am just backing up the whole /home/<user> minus directories like .cache.
          Storage is cheap.

          Nothing. I live life on the edge.

          If I were to back up, and I should as re-doing many things is time-consuming, I'd copy my /home/justin into Dropbox (soon to be NextCloud). That's it basically.

            I make a backup of any data or configuration file I remember changing. I'll also make a backup snapshot of data or configuration files if I'm making a lot of changes. The snapshot backups are in case I mess something up and don't notice it.

            I always append the date and a sequential number, and the computer model (I use two computers) to the end of my files. That way, I know when the file was backed up and from what computer. For example:

            my--spreadsheet--file_20190504-01_xyz123.ods

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            • Post #20
            • Edited

            I settled with doing daily backups with Vorta of my home folder omitting some stuff that are easily downloaded or not important like games, spotify and browser cache! I also backup /etc/ settings i dont want to redo incase that day ever came and some folder on my windows partition.

            I backup this to my Google drive storage until i can find something that can replace that - sofar nothing has peaked my interest or wallet size! 🙂

            Thanks again all for the answers!

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            • Post #22

            I backup my home using backintime once a week to an external USB drive.
            My "system" (a.k.a. "/" a.k.a. "root") gets snapshotted daily by timeshift to my other internal "data" HDD.

            So i always have my personal stuff (-> home) on my external drive. The snapshots of my system are still stored on my laptop (not external like my home), but at least on another drive (system on ssd -> snapshot to hdd). So i am pretty relaxed doing system upgrades like this weekend (gnome stack upgrade) 😁

            2 years later