Most of us have been in a situation where we’ve lost a lot of personal data due to some unfortunate happenstance, and if you haven’t, take it from us... you don’t want to be in that situation.
There can be hardware malfunction, or personal mistake that can suddenly wipe out everything that’s digitally important to you. Suddenly that sneaky picture you took of Grandma’s cookie recipe when she wasn’t looking -POOF. Gone. Nowadays there is also the risk of ransomware slipping into your system (less risk with Linux).
<aside> 🚨 Ransomware is designed to encrypt all your personal files so that they’re not accessible without a long password, then you’ll get a prompt saying that you need to pay money in exchange for getting this long password to recover your data. You’re never guaranteed that the files will be released after you pay, so it’s always best just to have a backup that isn’t connected to your computer.
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If you have an external hard drive, or cloud storage, the most straight forward way to back up your important files is just to copy your Home folder off your computer.
Home includes anything on your Desktop as well as everything else pictured in the image above which is likely where any of your important files are going to be saved.
If your intention is for this to be a Ransomware risk mitigation backup, you’ll want to make sure that you don’t keep the external hard drive plugged into your computer, and that you don’t set up automated uploading of these files to your cloud storage. Just imagine if your computer automatically copies infected files into your SAFE storage, then your backups start getting encrypted as well. Devastating. Make sure that this backup is isolated from your computer except for when you’re backing up.
If you already have an isolated backup saved, and this is just so you have data redundancy (multiple copies), there are services that can sync your home folder to servers on the internet which can be pretty handy in case you delete or misplace an important file.
MX (KDE) originally came with an application called “Back in Time” which looked pretty cool, but in our testing was a bit flaky, so we’ve installed Timeshift on your system which is a lot more reliable right now.
If your system hasn’t been set up for backups yet, the first time you start Timeshift, you’ll be guided through their setup wizard.
<aside> ✅ If you don’t have much space on your computer, for this method you’ll want to consider using an external drive, or at least a different drive than what the rest of your files are taking space on. Using an external drive is also protection in case your internal drive fails.
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They ask you to choose between RSYNC and BTRFS. Choose RSYNC as the default. BTRFS will only work on a different installation of Linux. Click Next.
Select the device that is running your operating system. Click Next
Select how often you want snapshots made. If you tend to create, move, or delete many files in a day, you may want to select Daily, but Weekly or Monthly may be enough otherwise. It’s really a personal choice in estimating how much you’d be missing if something failed in this time period.
In this step we’re selecting which files should be included in the snapshot. By default Timeshift excludes all user home files, and will just be backing up the operational state of your computer. You may want to select Include All Files on the right for any users on your computer where you want to save the personal files under Home. If you want the entirety of your computer in the snapshot, you could do the same for /root, however this would include a lot of system files that you could get back by just reinstalling Linux.
