On Linux, I have my .bashrc, Vim config, other config files, documents, etc. backed up to various Git repos. All the essential stuff I wouldn’t want to lose.

I don’t make an effort to preserve my entire home directory, there’s just too much junk that accumulates over time.

Evey 5 years or so, I find some reason to reinstall Linux and start over, which is like a breath of fresh air.

What is your backup strategy?

None. I mean it.

When I forget my gloves in the train I don’t check lost and found either.

I can redo whatever I could have lost in less time than I would waste doing all these backups and whatnot.

I use borg + rclone for years. The caveat is that I have to manually trigger my script but nothing prevents it from being scheduled, I just haven’t bothered. Motivation to tinker with macOS deteriorates by the week lately.

Having various backup tools like borg or restic (or rustic) gives you another layer of backups i.e. it’s a “repository” of backup snapshots which you can configure to have N past backups based on counts or time slots. And then that repository I disperse across multiple cloud services (and my own home server), compressed, deduplicated and encrypted.

I also test my backups once a month or two. Because if you don’t do that, they are pointless.

I don’t really backup anything. Everything that is important is in apple photos or git. I have a bunch of stuff on my icloud drive too but I could wipe my laptop right now and not miss anything except some time reinstalling my apps as and when I need them.

My servers I only backup the db for similar reasons(I have scripts in git that can setup everything again faster than a backup would restore) and I use pgbackrest for that.

First of all, my go-to answer for Time Machine conundrums is Howard Oakley’s Eclectic Light Company, and he had a post on APFS and indicates that Time Machine backups are always on case sensitive APFS volumes. In a comment on a Tidbits thread on this post, Matt Sephton explained that APFS user disks are case insensitive and APFS Time Machine disks are case sensitive, so if two files have the same name, both will be backed up.

As to my backup strategy, as others have said, a lot of critical stuff is in iCloud or GitHub. But having lived through a couple of disk crashes, one before I did any backups (a long time ago - the drive was a 10MB drive in a Mac SE - and required clean room disk recovery) and the other when I only used Time Machine (and the recovery was slooow), I settled on a multi-layer strategy. I use Time Machine (SSD attached to my iMac) for incremental backups to handle a deleted file, etc. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a full disk image of the data portion of the drive (I used to use it for bootable backups, but that no longer makes sense). If a computer isn’t functioning when I buy a new one, this backup is used to transfer data. Finally I use a third party, off-premise backup in case of a fire or other disaster destroying all the local backups.