My current setup is Mint 21 (Cinnamon) on an older (2012ish?) 500GB Samsung laptop.

I tried Rescuezilla 2.4.1 (Focal), but immediately incurred a screen of scrolling error messages, so I retreated to Rescuezilla 2.3.1 (Focal), which works (having already backed up AND restored successfully); either process takes under 10 minutes to complete, which I like very much.

My needs are very basic. I've read good things about Clonezilla Live and Redo Rescue. How do they compare to Rescuezilla, in terms of efficiency and ease to use? Are there other worthy contenders?

Thanks, guys...

May you have a Happy Holliday Season!

AntiX has something called LuckyBackup which seems easy to use. Like rsync it allows you to do incremental backups.

Are "incremental backups" those which only capture changes from the previous backup? I prefer full backups.

FenderGuy,

I use the GUI version of rsync, grsync on my Linux Mint desktop PC which has 2 drives.

Install using:

This blog may be of help to you:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...failure-38296/

For a laptop, you would need to have a second drive permanently connected and the /etc/fstab file modified accordingly.

For further details, scroll down that article to see **Make a New Directory on a Second Drive.

I've heard good things about Back in Time. I use rsync myself.

I'm using Duplicity from a systemd timer every hour with Deja-Dup for restores as needed from my desktops to a local external usb drive on each. Duplicity does incremental but in my case I have it created a full backup every 30 days. Between is incremental. I also have rdiff-backup on my server pulling my /home/"$USER" directories once a day. I stopped doing clones because A - they require downtime, B - they are really not useful as they need to be done manually for the most part. Inevitably you will forget to do it. Better to have something automated. Timeshift is a better alternative IMHO for main system backups. Does all but /home which should be more versioned / incremental anyway. Only downside is it must be to a local drive. Usb works fine. You can also automate tarballs of your system so that is another good option if you are set on the full backup idea. Nothing wrong with it and it should have zero downtime. You can get static snapshots with LVM to make tarballs from if you are worried about potential changes during tar operation. You can never have to many types of backups I suppose.

I'm curious why incremental bother's you. You can backup 30, 60... whatever days in nearly the same space as a single backup but it = to 30, 60 whatever full backups. Really no downside if you do it right. But that is just an opinion. I'm not calling you out or anything. It's ultimately about efficiency.

There is a user over on the ubuntu forums named TheFu. They've got great write-ups on good backup strategies. Worth a read if you are so inclined.

The scripts I use if you are interested

LVM Tarballs - https://gitlab.com/jmgibson1981/home...hell/lvmtar.sh
Rdiff-backup Pull, Requires root ssh via ssh key. - https://gitlab.com/jmgibson1981/home...pullbackups.sh
Mixed Push Backups, Refence use only - https://gitlab.com/jmgibson1981/home...edirbackups.sh