I recently bought a 1TiB Samsung T5 SSD - pretty damn surprised I can get something of such capacity in something about the same size as a credit card! The last SSD I bought cost about the same but was 120GiB 😂

Anyway, I wanted to make sure I was properly backup up my laptop. I plan on using it for a lot more than just laptop backups though, and I didn’t want to partition the drive to use it with Time Machine

Soooo instead, I’m creating .tar.gz archives :) Simple and easy.

I’ll be updating this page as I update the script, but I’m basically taring up my entire home directory with some exclusions. Note that these exclusions are Mac OS specific, so if you’re using Linux you’re probably going to want to have different settings

BACKUP=backup-macbook-$(date +%FT%H:%M:%S).tar.gz
 
tar -cvpzf $BACKUP \
	--exclude=$BACKUP \
	--exclude=.cache \
	--exclude=.debug \
	--exclude=.local/lib \
	--exclude=.local/share/virtualenvs \
	--exclude=.recently-used \
	--exclude=.thumbnails \
	--exclude=.pyenv \
	--exclude=.Trash \
	--exclude=.npm \
	--exclude=.poetry \
	--exclude=.kube \
	--exclude=.fastlane \
	--exclude=.mix \
	--exclude=.pyenv \
	--exclude=.gem \
	--exclude=.vscode \
	--exclude=.cocoapods \
	--exclude=Downloads \
	--exclude=Library \
	--exclude=Movies \
	--exclude=Music \
	--exclude=nltk_data \
	--exclude=Pictures \
	--exclude=pkg \
	--exclude=Applications \
	.

I’m actually backing up my iCloud photos to this drive as well, using this script. It’s really good! Doesn’t seem to be maintained any more, but does the job perfectly.

It’s probably a good idea to encrypt anything sensitive, which backups and photos probably are.

GPG is pretty useful for this:

gpg --symmetric --cipher-algo AES256 $BACKUP