Best incremental backup of system and home partitions?

I've recently screwed up my system and although I had a backup, it probably wasn't the best type of backup and it was 3 months old. I've always wanted to have a better backup system in place but never got around to it.

Well, now is the best time for it, since I'm currently reinstalling everything from scratch.

What's the best/easiest way to do a full system backup, periodically (say, every week) and incrementally? Or, as an alternative to incremental backups, always keep the last X full backups (to conserve space).

Around the forums I see most people recommending CloneZilla but AFAIK (correct me if I'm wrong) that is a manual process and I'm looking for something automatic, unattended.

On another note... Although I said full system backup, there's a few things I don't want to backup, downloads. And what I mean by downloads is not the final downloads, those are stored on a different data drive. I'm talking about those temporary downloaded files that will be used by post-processors and moved to the data drive. I don't want that stuff to be caught in the middle of a backup and be included, it's pointless.

What would be my best option? Thoughts?

I know I can research those up and I like to do so to learn more (and I'm about to fire up Google) but... You just used 3 keywords in one sentence that I've never heard of (rootfs, btrfs and subvolume)

Can you please just give me a short overview of each and how would I use them together?

I suppose there's no guide for that on these forums?

Zitat von subzero79

If you would have btrfs with daily / snapshots you would have easily roll back with no hassle to wheezy in a single reboot.

If it's this easy, why isn't there a backup plugin for this? Seems like a no brainer to me to have such easy and quick backup system. Is this just because no one ever got around to it (maybe lack of time or something else) or just because there are other things to consider? Just curious, not trying to criticize anyone's free time

I've been reading a little about it and seems to confusing to setup, unless you know what you are doing. Every guide I read had way too different commands to do things and unless I really understand what I'm doing, I might as well not mess things up (again). But seems like a nice and easy solution to use after the hassle of settings everything up.

Maybe there's a similar solution - but easier to setup/use - that someone could share?

Will take a look at that as soon as I finish reconfiguring everything. Thank you.

In the mean time, I'm always open to new alternatives, if anyone has any...