Hints and tips

Speed the backup by excluding unnecesary files from the backup

In the config file you can specify the file types and directories to exclude from the backup via the setting:

export BM_TARBALL_BLACKLIST="/tmp /dev /proc *.mp3 *.mpg"

Use it to exclude thumbnails, temp files, backup files, browser cache, etc.

Understand encryption before encrypting the backup

Make sure you understand and know how to use GPG and know how to generate and safely store keys and how to decrypt archives. GUI tools help but you better know how to do everything from the command line. GPG encryption is a very powerful tool but one misconfiguration will render your backup unusable.

How to backup Debian's selected packets list

It's a good idea for a Debian system to keep track of all installed packages. That could be done easily with Backup Manager, with a "pipe" method configured like the following:

# Debian
BM_PIPE_COMMAND[0]="/usr/bin/dpkg --get-selections"
BM_PIPE_NAME[0]="dpkg"
BM_PIPE_FILETYPE[0]="txt"
BM_PIPE_COMPRESS[0]="gzip"

Note that on debian systems, this data should already be present (in a different format) in /var/backups. Be sure to know how you would recover the configuration!