Embed Notice

@billyjoebowers The reason is that Linux is for both personal use and for servers in data centers. And some people write confusing documentation.

Timeshift makes it easy to restore just the system files, should an upgrade wreak havoc. It hasn't happened in years, but in the current political climate, it is a good idea to be able to just roll it all back with a mouse click to a prior running version. It's installed, but you need to point its data at a separate disk from the boot disk. This is a very easy backup solution for the system. Super easy.

The Backup utility (also should be installed) concept is that your home directory tree is where your personal files are. Backing them up separately makes some sense in that, if all you want to do is restore that, why screw with the system file backup to do it? At one company, we kept a gzipped tarball of every customer's home folders made several times a day, and we also had backups.

A complete backup system is BackupPC. You'd need to install that one yourself using apt. I've used it to back up commercial servers before. It has been around forever. It can backup and restore more than Linux, but it requires installing some code on systems to be backed up. It keeps one copy of identical files, reducing the space it needs. If you want a full backup system, it's great. It doesn't care if it's system files or not. I don't usually install BackupPC for small stuff.

Timeshift does a really good job.

Backup (the utility) is fine.

That's really all you need, for most users. If you'd prefer to do it from the command line in a single string of strange and magical incantations, just ask!