Well having a dedicated /home partition is the very minimum and pretty much default.

If you are interested in having a backup/restore solution for your system you are looking for BTRFS which uses sub volumes instead of primary partitions and is compatible with snapshot tools, those tools being Timeshift and Snapper.

I do think Snapper is the superior solution however it's also more complex to set up and requires significantly more prep work. Imo totally worth it.

I currently use it on my main machine Debian with BTRFS and Snapper and couldn't be happier.

Nothing, I just corupted my hard drive with all my college work for tomorrow and im trying to save them, im feeling so stupid rn, im nothing but a failure at this point

On servers I like to have /var on its own partition. Partially as a habit from the olden days of using FreeBSD in the 90's, but also because that means that / will mostly be left with things that don't really change. I've had to clean out clogged up / too many times. So in effect, my partion schema for a typical production server looks like this:

/ ext4
/local xfs
/global usually beegfs or nfs, but sometimes a local xfs.
/var ext4
/home ext4

Besides btrfs, there are immutable distros like fedora silverblue. The system doesn't update when something goes wrong during the update and you can roll back if it updated.

It is a bit more difficult to handle and understand, imo, for a new linux user if the user wants to tinker with the system.

Thanks for all your comments, a lot of interesting things here.

I went with BtrFS with Timeshift. Seems to have improved in terms of performance a lot that I barely noticed any difference compared to the previous installation with Ext4, if any at all.

Unfortunately the current Ubuntu 23.10 installer doesn't properly set btrfs subvolumes correctly for @ and @home and instead instead just throws the entire OS at the root of the FS, making it incompatible with Timeshift and causing FS snapshots to live in the Linux directories, which in turn would cause future snapshots to contain snapshots, not great...

Fortunately migrating to a subvolume layout is possible although it was quite painful following this outdated and a bit not well written post https://www.reddit.com/r/btrfs/s/qWi84tGJam

After successfully installing the system and setting up btrfs layouts and Timeshift, I created the first system snapshot and I feel extremely confident about this solid system.

Thanks again for sharing your experience!

Right now I'm using Garuda Linux, it takes a snapshot during major updates. Easily restored if something breaks.

Time shift saved my but a time or two in the past.

I simply backup the /home folder, where the important files are with duplicity on my home server with ftp once a week, keeping records of the last 6 months. But as that only restores the home folder i also take a snapshot (which takes way more disk space) every month with timeshift too, which stays on the pc. Would be great if i could take complete snapshots via ftp just like with duplicity, but timeshift doesn't do that.

I only have three partitions, all ext4:

• /dev/sda1 mounted as / - if necessary I wipe it out, reinstall my junk and call it a day. The only non-default things there are a few /etc files but I got a manual backup of the ones that matter. It's in the SSD to access is really fast.
• /dev/sdb1 mounted as /home - that's my precious, for files that are personal and/or impossible to replace. Kept as small as possible so I can mirror it into a USB stick. It's in the HDD, right at the start so access is fast.
• /dev/sdb2 mounted as /storage - originally I created this partition to bulk store my anime series, music, etc. so I could broadcast them through SMB across my house. If I lose those files I'll probably be pissed, but they can be recovered with some sweat, blood, and torrents. Access speed is not that big of a concern for those files.

I'm actually considering to create a fourth partition. See, the /storage partition has 1.6 TB, so I created a /storage/binarios subdir in it so I can install a few programs (mostly games)... that's just /opt reinvented poorly, might as well promote it to its own partition.

I use NixOS & Home Manager. My config is in git, and I use an ephemeral setup with ZFS & tmpfs:

Mount layout:

/		 tmpfs  
├─/boot /dev/sda1  FAT32 EFI system partition
├─/nix	 rpool/local/nix ZFS partition
├─/home/persist rpool/safe/home ZFS partition
└─/persist	 rpool/safe/persist ZFS partition

ZFS partitions under rpool/safe/ get backed up, the rest don't need to be. Everything else can be rebuilt (and most of it gets re-created at boot anyway, since / and /home are tmpfs).

Not really partition related but in terms of backups, state replication and reliability:

State of Systems: NixOS configs. Art: Borg + Borgbase. Code: Git + Sourcehut.

500 MiB ESP mounted at /efi
Swap equal to my RAM at /home/swapfile
Root equal to 25% of my disk, formatted with btrfs with auto snapshots.
Home takes the rest of my disk, formatted with btrfs WITHOUT AUTO SNAPSHOTS, so swap works.

I have my EFI boot partition with 512M on /boot, zram instead of swap, then a whole lot of btrfs subvolumes, with RAID across several disks. I do a lot of snapshotting, and auto-snapshotting, but thats mostly for local rollback. I only btrfs-send to a machine on the LAN. For my real backups I use Restic, sending that data to a number of places.