My way of a full system backup without external software: incremental rsync plus btrfs with zstd compression

The repo of this script is https://gitlab.com/vitaly‑zdanevich/full‑backup/‑/blob/master/full‑backup.sh

Incremental with hard links means that if a file is not changed, on the next backup it will link to the same underlying data, like deduplication. Hard links — its usual files.

Also, this script ignores .gitignore of every folder.

Run this script from another system.

# Start this script from the git folder of this script # This script accepts the path to the partition to backup (mounted) # Use this script NOT from the system you want to backup - boot from another system  if [ -z "$1" ]; then echo "Missing path of the source (what to backup)" exit 1 fi  BEFORE=$(df -h)  STARTED=$(date)  DATE=`date "+%Y-%m-%d"`  p=$(pwd)  cd $1 # Because rsync --exclude-from accepts only relative paths, not absolute  rsync --archive --acls --xattrs --delete --progress --verbose --exclude-from=$p/exclude.txt --filter=':- .gitignore' --link-dest=$p/last --mkpath $1 $p/$DATE  ln --symbolic --force --no-dereference $DATE last  echo "Started at:   " $STARTED echo "Current time: " $(date)  echo "Before:  $BEFORE  Now: "  df -h  cd -  # How to restore: # # rsync --archive --acls --xattrs --progress --verbose <from> <to> # /etc/fstab: alter UUID # grub install (if new SSD) https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Grub: #     grub-install # Note that if SSD is more than 2 GB - you cannot use MBR, only GPT with EFI partition (ThinkPad T430 supports UEFI boot) # emerge-webrsync # emaint sync guru   # Documentation: # https://jumpcloud.com/blog/how-to-backup-linux-system-rsync # https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/rsync

exclude.txt:

dev/* proc/* sys/* run/* # If run on the system that you want to backup  var/db/repos/gentoo var/db/repos/guru var/cache/distfiles/  tmp/* var/tmp  lost+found mnt/*  home/vitaly/.npm/ home/vitaly/.cache/  home/vitaly/.zoom/  home/vitaly/.mozilla/firefox/*/storage home/vitaly/.config/google-chrome/ home/vitaly/.config/chromium/ home/vitaly/.config/Microsoft/Microsoft Teams/ home/vitaly/.config/teams-for-linux/ home/vitaly/.config/Slack/ home/vitaly/.thumbnails/  home/vitaly/.cache/ home/vitaly/.local/share/TelegramDesktop/tdata/user_data/cache/ home/vitaly/.local/share/TelegramDesktop/tdata/user_data/media_cache/ home/vitaly/.local/share/Steam/ home/vitaly/.googleearth/Cache/ home/vitaly/.local/share/OMaps/ home/vitaly/.config/Audius/Cache/ home/vitaly/.config/YandexMusic/Cache/ home/vitaly/.config/vesktop/sessionData/Cache/ home/vitaly/.config/bilibili/Cache/ home/vitaly/.local/share/Trash/  home/vitaly/go/pkg/mod/cache/ home/vitaly/.cargo/registry/  home/vitaly/record/out/  home/vitaly/Desktop/unreal-5-4-4/

My HDD for backups is on btrfs for ZSTD compression, how to prepare the disk:

sudo apt install btrfs-progs -y # https://details.nl/install-and-use-btrfs-on-ubuntu-20-04-lts  sudo mkfs.btrfs /dev/sdX # Partitions are not needed  sudo mount -o compress-force=zstd:15 /dev/sdX /mnt # Max compression level is 15 # Default compression you can add to fstab

After backup — you can see the compression ratio:

sudo apt install btrfs-compsize sudo compsize /mnt

Output example:

   Processed 54036 files, 42027 regular extents (42028 refs), 27150 inline.    Type       Perc     Disk Usage   Uncompressed Referenced    TOTAL       73%      211G         289G         289G    zstd        28%       42M         148M         148M    none       100%      174G         174G         174G

The main column here is Perc — lower is better compression.

Besides this backup solution, I store every config in a separate git repository, not one repo for all dot files.

Sometimes I use Clonezilla — with xz compression of the full drive, for Windows and Linux.

This article is based on my Russian article https://habr.com/en/articles/929182, where people also recommended their backup solutions:

https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid/wiki/Syncoid

https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid

https://github.com/bit‑team/backintime

https://github.com/ei‑grad/trinkup

https://restic.net

https://www.urbackup.org

https://www.borgbackup.org

https://kopia.io