Nice! Thanks!

When I researched this previously I concluded that there are two very good options for regular backups: Borg and Restic. These are especially efficient at backing up a diff of what has changed since the last backup. So you get snapshots of your filesystem state at each backup point without using a huge amount of space. You can mount any snapshot as a virtual directory. After the initial backup, incremental backups take a minute or two.

I use Borg, and I back up to cloud storage on Borgbase. I use Vorta as a GUI for Borg. I have Vorta start automatically when I start my window manager, and I have it set up for daily backups. I set up the same thing on my kid’s computer.

I back up my home directory. I have some excluded directories like ~/.cache, and Steam’s data directory. I use Baobab to find large directories that I don’t want backed up.

I use the “exclude caches” option in the Borg “create archive” settings. That automatically excludes Rust target/ directories because they follow the Cache Directory Tagging Specification. Not all programming languages’ tooling follows that spec so I also use directory name pattern excludes. For example I have an exclude pattern for .*/node_modules/.*

I use NixOS, and I keep my system config in a git repo so I don’t need backups for anything outside my home directory.

Probably not very similar, but Git Butler is very interesting. It adds its own layer of management so that you can have multiple branches “applied” to your working tree simultaneously. It’s helpful when you have multiple changes that should go into different branches, and some that shouldn’t be committed - it has a system of lanes that help keep track of all that. Or you can test how changes from two branches interact.

Last time I used it, maybe 6 months ago, it was rough around the edges so I didn’t stick with it. But they’ve done lots of work since then so I’m thinking of giving it another go. It is (last I checked) an all-in tool. When you’re using Butler on a project you probably won’t be able to use other git tools.