My aim is to back up my laptop so it is restored just like it was before, with all the files, apps, app data, themes, and settings. I'm afraid that if I only backup home then my themes and settings will not backup, and only my personal files will, is that true? I'm not very familiar with the filesystems yet...
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4Possible duplicate of What's a good back-up strategy for 1 desktop PC? especially this answer. Use CloneZilla Live to make off-line backups. – Fabby Aug 05 '19 at 18:15
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Your themes and desktop settings are in ".*" files in your home directory. Backing up /home is a must, /root can also be done.
Nevertheless there are global settings in /etc that I also always backup. Depending on what you do there might be files also in /var/ (e.g. databases, emails maybe, logfiles or similar), so this should also be backed up. There is no need to copy /etc and /var/ into your new installation, but backing those files up helps you when something is not working anymore or you are missing data.
More easy to do is to backup the whole partition (with e.g. clonezilla). Then nothing can be forgotten but of course this needs much more storage space.
thedler
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You may also want to backup a list of installed apps. https://askubuntu.com/questions/17823/how-to-list-all-installed-packages there also is a lot of cruft you do not need to backup. http://askubuntu.com/questions/545655/backup-your-home-directory-with-rsync-and-skip-useless-folders & https://askubuntu.com/questions/657091/whats-the-good-way-to-clean-up-the-system-and-is-bleachbit-safe-on-ubuntu-14 – oldfred Aug 03 '19 at 16:59