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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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Timeshift is completely unnecessary. Fedora Atomic's rollbacking is more powerful and avoids certain issues.
You should only be backing up personal files, not OS files. The OS is replaceable, your personal files are not.
I've been backing up my OS and my personal files with borg to my NAS.
Saved me a weekend of setup and config editing once before, when my drive failed.
Or do you just remember all the config changes you did and type them out from the top of your head? And all the apps you have installed? It's over 300 apps and 100 config files for me.
The OS is tiny compared to personal files. It doesn't make sense not to back it up.
Well, kinda. I have have scripts to set up most of my system after an installation. It’s nice so that I don’t have to remember everything I’ve done. It means I can reinstall my system or install on a new system with relative ease.
Doesn’t need to be anything complex. Just having a list of packages I want installed and that I can copy into my terminal makes things so much faster.
I install or configure something every week.
In addition to doing the config, I'd have to edit a script as well, which seems like more hassle. At this point, why not go for nixOS and have just the latter part of the hassle without having to also edit config files in / ?
Instead, I run the backup command after I change something. When I want to restore, I can mount any of the last 20 backups from the borg repo and either manually revert a file or use rsync to mass overwrite.
I was thinking of using btrfs send, which would probably be even better for the purposes of recovering from disk failure, but borg file based backup takes way less space and works well so far. And I don't have the extra effort of a declarative os or setup scripts.
Also works offline as long as I am with my NAS unlike a script that installs a list of packages from the repos.