I have recently trialed Fedora KDE Plasma and am pleased with it. There have been very few issues and almost all of them resolvable easily.
Data ( /home and / ) are backed up using Synology’s proprietary “Drive Client” to a NAS. I shall also look at backing up some other folders once I’ve discovered where config settings are stored for various apps. (The trick will be to restore ownership and permissions).
So this is about system recovery and not backups. My preferred approach is something like System Restore on Windows where the OS can be rolled back to a previous checkpoint. This is very useful when installing new apps and removing them during testing / trialing, or if the installation corrupts the OS. My preferred strategy is an entirely separate recovery drive, bootable with the same OS as the main installation and with the recovery software in place. A second, larger partition on that 2nd drive would hold the snapshots of the main drive.
I’ve tried snapper + btrfs-assistant as well as Timeshift and run into problems with both; the latter twice making the main drive unbootable. (fortunately that main drive is yet a 3rd disk used only for testing and is simply recovered by reinstalling the OS). It’s the “restore” where issues (and demons) lie; not in creating lots of lovely restore points.
I’ve also tried Kinoite which is almost identical to a standard Fedora install but have found the flatpack repositories won’t install apps not present by default - other users, historically, have also run into similar problems. The symlinks from /home to /var/home came as a surprise. There were a few other surprises too. Kinoite still feels a bit “young” but I accept the notion that immutable installs are probably the future.
So far, Fedora + KDE Plasma fits the bill well. If I could rely on Timeshift I’d definitely use that. On Windows I’ve used Macrium Reflect in the past and that’s always been reliable.
I’ve read last night about Vorta + Borg but I suspect it’s more backup than system recovery software. Happy to try though.
I’d appreciate some thoughts on recovery software (or approaches, or software combinations) that I could try. Securing a system to me is a priority and am quite happy to invest time in choosing and testing something that’s robust.
Thanks, Ric