this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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Hello there! Here's the thing: I got some old HDD for my Debian home server, and now that I have plenty of disk space I want to keep a backup of the OS, so that if something accidentally breaks (either SW or HW) I can quickly fix it.

now the question is: which directory should I include and which should I exclude from the backup? I use docker a lot, is there any docker-specific directory that I should back up?

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[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Backup everything as a bootable system image, that's the best method for recovery IMO.

[–] tubbadu@lemmy.kde.social 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

wouldn't this take a lot of time? but I can see the advantage, being able to just roll back whatever happened

I'll think about it, thank you very much!

Only the first backup, after that with most backup software it will do incremental backups with delta transfer, so will only send the data that has changed since the last backup.