Today we want to create a Backup of our full System and our other Drives. rsync enables us to copy our Files, with all their MetaData, to any directory. This includes all symbolic links, devices, permissions, ownerships, modification times, ACLs, and extended attributes.

0. Setup external Drive with a Linux File System

To save all our MetaData, we need to partition a Disk with ext4, a File System that can store this kind of information.

1. Backup Full System

Now we can save our full root Directory excluding unnecessary Files into our <backup_folder>:

sudo rsync -aAXH --info=progress2 --delete --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found","/home/*/.local/share/Trash/","/home/*/.cache/*"} / /<backup_folder>

2. Backup other Drives

To store all of our other Drives under our <backup_folder> we need to exclude our <backup_drive>:

sudo rsync -aAXH --info=progress2 --delete --exclude={"<backup_drive>/*"} /run/media/ /<backup_folder>

3. Delete Empty Directories

After we saved all Files we want to keep, we can cleanup our Backup and delete all empty Directories. This will make it easier to restore the Backup.

find . -type d -empty -delete

4. Save Pacman

We can save a lot of Time and speed up the installation on a new system, if we save a List of installed Packages called pkglist.txt:

sudo pacman -Qqe > pkglist.txt