On 22 September 2017 at 13:08, Chris Green cl@isbd.net wrote:
As a general rule for myself I do my very best not to customise things too much and to keep installations as standard as possible. Thus all my installations, as far as possible, only have differences from 'as installed' in /etc and /home so I just back those up.
Ditto, although increasingly I'm starting to use /opt as well.
One thing I like about my tar-based backup is that in principle I can add additional "incremental" [*] tarballs to the base quite easily. So I can, for example, take a current Raspbian, apt upgrade it to get latest packages (and maybe a standard set of non-default packages I use), then back it up as a snapshot. I can then take my "application" code and include that in the backup so that it gets restored over the top and ends up with a finished system, but in a way which is more-or-less trivial to manage the OS updates separately from the application.
[*] It's not a true incremental backup as it would only replace or add files, not delete them. But it's close enough for my purposes, and I'm sure the extra deletion step could be brought in if needed.