My current backup strategy is to backup the whole filesystem. I run services in actual VMs, not docker containers, with disks mounted from LVM volumes which all

My current backup strategy is to backup the whole filesystem. I run services in actual VMs, not docker containers, with disks mounted from LVM volumes which allows me to take snapshots and back them up live without needing to shut them down. I'm using bup to do the actual backups to a server I'm keeping in my home. I wrote a few custom scripts to backup and restore servers, and keep a history of the last x days, y weeks and z months. That way it gives me more time to figure out if something's wrong, as it's hobby stuff that I'm not checking every day. My advice for OP would be to 1/ ditch tarsnap. A backups tool that runs for hours without any feedback ? A restore tool that fails if the files are too big ? Everything extremely slow ? Just forget it. 2/ keep more than 3 days of backups. It's too short if you make a mistake, it took 3 days to recover from this one already. 3/ backup everything. Don't try to pick and choose files, you're likely to forget something, and if not now then some time later when you create a new file but forget to add it to the list of things to back up.