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Very nice! I'm a big fan of homepage. What do you use for the upcoming TV shows widget?
Timeshift is the reason I learned how to use rsync. I wrote my own script that made a more complete backup and can automate multiple incremental backups with a customizable max number of backups.
It's simple and so much more reliable. Even when I forget to test my backups, they still work when the time comes.
At least Timeshift taught me how to use rsync, so there's that.
Yes, I definitely make use of rsync for backups of specific directories, so, in this case, no data would have been lost if I had relied solely on timeshift. But it's a very convenient way of snapshotting the whole system.
Timeshift is essentially a gui on top of rsync anyway, if you look at what it's doing behind the scenes.
Timeshift is essentially a gui on top of rsync anyway, if you look at what it's doing behind the scenes.
That's the reason why I chose to learn rsync. I was frustrated with Timeshift. It failed to restore some changes multiple times. It gave me issues with docker. It also had default excludes that were annoying to change as well.
I then learned how to make a complete system backup with rsync itself. /, /boot/ and /boot/efi/ has to be done on separate rsync commands. Basically one command per partition.
A restore involves flipping the source and destination in the rsync command. It also allows me to boot into a live USB and perform a restore in the event that I really mess up and can't perform a restore normally through the installed OS.
By leaving behind the GUI, I got a lot more flexibility. It's also a lot more reliable and I've had a lot less restore issues.
I was looking into this recently and un-convinced myself that rsync was handling all the symlinks and permissions correctly.
What's your command options? I was using -Prvtz for ages, then thought I needed an Aa too (from memory)
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
20 points (95.5% liked)
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