4 Linux Backup Utilities You Can Use 

rclone is more akin to rsync than an actual backup utility. It will let you make files sync but, say, if a file is incorrectly overwritten in the source for whatever reason, it will be also overwritten in the destination when rclone do its thing. Tools like borg and restic provide file versioning, which protects you from that scenario.

Restic is almost overkill for smaller homelabs, but, yeah, it's a good product.

Both borg and restic descend from the same codebase and offer pretty much the same backup features. The only major difference between the two is that restic is very flexible as to what will be used as backend for the backup itself, supporting many popular cloud storage services. That said, borg seems to be the most stable between the two; you can find some awful horror stories online with people losing data to restic although, to be honest, it has been very stable for me so far.

@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 I've personally never had an issue with restic. Although, it would be nice to have a GUI to manage the snapshots. Yes I know I can mount them but still.

@@Darkk6969 That's my biggest peeve with restic: the lack of decent GUI front-ends such as Pika Backup and Vorta. Even duplicity has decent options for GUI. While restic itself is not hard to drive from the CLI, it may be hard just enough to discourage newbies from using it which is a shame.

You can create an image of your entire Linux system or just selected partitions using Clonezilla (or Rescuezilla for a more "graphical" approach) but that's typically better suited for a backup tool to restore on the same system where the image was taken from due to, as you already guessed, UUIDs and other hardware-specific tidbits. One could also use the _btrfs send_ functionality in BTRFS to save filesystem snapshots onto a diffferent btrfs system but I guess that would also imply in having conflicting hardware setup info being carried on with the snapshot as well. Personally, if the goal is to replicate the settings of an existing system onto another, I am really fond of a Debian tool called apt-clone. It creates a tarball that has not only package information of the system to be cloned but also /etc settings wherever applicable that can be used to replicate the setup on a different machine using apt-clone itself. But obviously, as the name implies, it will only work on Debian and its derivatives.

Foxclone is a much more user friendly alternative to clonezilla...

You can even backup windows with WSL

I used to use TimeShift, but since it does not dedup, boy, does it take up precious hard disk space.

Timeshift does filesystem snapshots which is not exactly the same thing as a backup per se. Yes, there are situations where snapshots are handy to recover data quickly but it is important to keep that distinction in mind. Plus if you are saving snapshots in the same storage medium as the original data, you might as well pretend you don't have any backup at all.

@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 snapshots only works with btfrs disks. Most installs I've run across lately are using ext4. btfrs are very efficient with snapshots.

@@KeithWeston Timeshift is actually very space-efficient when using btrfs but if you are using with an ext4 filesystem then your only resort is rsync and welp... rsync-based snapshots eat storage space like there is no tomorrow, indeed.

You are not wrong. Pika Backup is a front-end for borg. Being a GNOME app, it takes a simpler approach from an UI perspective but it is just as capable as Vorta (which is another borg front-end and happens to be my favorite).