Linux: /home Is All You Need

A quick-dev guide to backing your machine onto an external drive — and never stopping the build

You don’t back up a Linux dev box the way you back up a Windows laptop. You don’t image the whole disk. You don’t reinstall apps from a list. On Linux, the OS is disposable and your /home is the machine. Your code, your dotfiles, your SSH keys, your shell history, your ~/.config, your half-finished dapps — all of it lives under one tree. Back that up and you can reinstall the distro in 20 minutes and be exactly where you left off.

This is the workflow I actually use: copy /home to a big external drive, verify it byte-for-byte, then reclaim local disk so you can keep building when your dapps start crossing 10+ GB each.

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Why /home is enough

What it holds	Where
All your source code & repos	~/projects, ~/code, wherever you cloned
Shell config, aliases, PATH	~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, ~/.profile
App settings	~/.config/
SSH keys, GPG, git identity	~/.ssh, ~/.gnupg, ~/.gitconfig
Credentials & tokens	~/.aws, ~/.npmrc, ~/.docker, etc.
Editor state	~/.vscode, ~/.config/Code, vim/nvim

Everything else — the kernel, /usr, installed packages — is reproducible from your distro’s package manager. Your /home is not. That’s the asymmetry. Back up the irreplaceable part.

The few things that live outside /home and you might want: /etc (system config you’ve hand-edited), and a list of installed packages (dpkg --get-selections on Debian/Ubuntu, pacman -Qqe on Arch). Tiny, optional, nice to have.

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Step 0 — Find your external drive

lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,FSTYPE,TYPE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL,MODEL
df -h | grep media

Look for your big disk and where it’s mounted — typically /media/<you>/<LABEL> or /mnt/.... Note the mountpoint; that’s your destination root.

Filesystem matters. For a real backup you want an ext4/Btrfs/XFS destination so Linux permissions, ownership, ACLs, and symlinks survive. If the drive is exFAT/NTFS/FAT, it cannot store Unix permissions or symlinks — wrap the backup in a tarball instead (see the bottom of this guide).

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Step 1 — Make the destination folder

Create it owned by you, not root, so you don’t fight permissions later:

mkdir -p /media/$USER/SOLID/home-backup

(Swap SOLID for your drive’s label.)

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Step 2 — Copy with rsync (the one command that matters)

rsync -aAXH --info=progress2 --no-inc-recursive \
  /home/youruser/ /media/$USER/SOLID/home-backup/

Decode:

• -a archive mode — recursive, preserves symlinks, timestamps, permissions, owner/group
• -A preserve ACLs
• -X preserve extended attributes
• -H preserve hardlinks (saves space, keeps trees intact)
• --info=progress2 one overall progress bar instead of a wall of filenames
• --no-inc-recursive scan the whole tree first so the progress bar shows a real % and ETA. Costs a few minutes of “nothing happening” up front while it builds the file list — that’s normal, let it run.
• Trailing slash on the source (/home/youruser/) copies the contents into the target folder, not a nested home-backup/youruser/. This bites everyone once. Mind the slash.

Backing up other users’ homes too? Then you need root to read them:

sudo rsync -aAXH --info=progress2 --no-inc-recursive --delete \
  /home/ /media/$USER/SOLID/home-backup/

Long copy? Don’t let a closed terminal kill it. Wrap it in tmux (or screen):

tmux new -s backup
run rsync inside; detach with Ctrl-b then d; reattach with: tmux attach -t backup

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Step 3 — Verify before you trust it

rsync finishing without errors is good. Proving every byte landed is better — especially if you’re about to delete the source. This pass re-reads everything and prints only what’s wrong:

rsync -aAXH --checksum --dry-run --itemize-changes \
  /home/youruser/ /media/$USER/SOLID/home-backup/

Empty output = perfect mirror. Any lines = files that differ or are missing; re-run the copy before you prune anything.

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Step 4 — Reclaim local disk and keep building

This is the payoff. Modern dapps are fat — node_modules, build artifacts, local chain data, and bundles routinely push a single project past 10 GB. A 256 GB laptop fills fast. Once your backup is verified, you can safely clear out what you’re not touching right now:

# See what's actually eating space — biggest dirs first
du -h --max-depth=1 ~ 2>/dev/null | sort -rh | head -30

Then prune the cheap-to-regenerate stuff first, before deleting any real source:

# node_modules everywhere (reinstall with one pnpm i when you come back)
find ~ -type d -name node_modules -prune -print -exec rm -rf {} +

build outputs
find ~ -type d \( -name dist -o -name .next -o -name build -o -name target \) -prune -exec rm -rf {} +

package-manager caches
pnpm store prune; npm cache clean --force; pip cache purge

For whole projects you’re done with: confirm they’re in the verified backup, then rm -rf the local copy. Keep only what you’re actively building on local NVMe — pull anything else back from the external on demand. Your fast disk becomes a working set, not a graveyard.

Golden rule: never rm a source until the checksum verify in Step 3 came back clean for it. “It copied” is not the same as “it’s identical.”

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Keep it fresh (incremental re-runs)

Re-run the exact same rsync line any time. It only transfers what changed, so the second run takes seconds, not an hour. Add --delete to make the backup a true mirror (files you removed locally also get removed from the backup):

rsync -aAXH --info=progress2 --delete \
  /home/youruser/ /media/$USER/SOLID/home-backup/

Want it automatic? Drop it in a script and add a cron entry or a systemd timer. But honestly, aliasing it and running it before you unplug the drive is enough for most of us.

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Edge case: exFAT / NTFS external drive

These can’t hold Unix permissions or symlinks, so don’t rsync onto them raw — you’ll lose metadata and choke on symlinks. Tar it up instead (the archive preserves everything):

tar -czf /media/$USER/EXFATDRIVE/home-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz -C /home youruser
restore later: tar -xzf home-backup-YYYYMMDD.tar.gz -C /home

Slower and not incremental, but correct. Better: reformat a dedicated backup drive to ext4.

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TL;DR

# 1. find the drive
lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,FSTYPE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL

2. make the target (owned by you)
mkdir -p /media/$USER/SOLID/home-backup

3. copy
rsync -aAXH --info=progress2 --no-inc-recursive /home/$USER/ /media/$USER/SOLID/home-backup/

4. VERIFY (empty output = safe)
rsync -aAXH --checksum --dry-run --itemize-changes /home/$USER/ /media/$USER/SOLID/home-backup/

5. reclaim space, keep only the working set local, keep building

Your distro is replaceable. Your /home is the machine. Back up the machine.

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