I like to try out new things and experiment with my systems quite a lot, and because of that, sometimes things break or don’t quite work as expected. Sometimes it’s a compatibility issue or because I messed up something. And that has sometimes cost me a lot of unnecessary effort and time.
I mostly never have to worry about most of my data, as I keep backups for most of it, or they are on cloud storage that I keep in sync with my local storage. It’s the state of my system that sometimes throws me off-guard, like, for instance, when I won’t be able to boot because my new arch update had an issue with my bootloader, or sometimes a software update breaks in some unexpected way and I have to figure out what’s wrong and fix it. So I like to keep a backup of my system state so that I can restore it to a working state if something goes wrong, and I need it to work as soon as possible. And that backup is mostly a disk image of my system with minimal things installed and configured. For that, up until now I’ve used g-parted and dd
for the most part, which are fairly basic and dumb utilities and work great. There are other, more advanced solutions out there, like Timeshift and Snapper, but they require a lot more setup and some insight into filesystems. For the most part, in my use case, I just want my system back up and running if I happen to break it. For the most part, I don’t require point-in-time backups or incremental backups.