The Best Tools Are the Simplest Tools
This relatively short article isn't about systemd and all sorts of bloated things which are being sold as uniformity or making things "universal" (i.e. no options or choices left). It's about doing things the "UNIX way". There's a whole lot of "spinning" going on since Sunday (many backups made) and GUIs are not required, nor are any backup "suites" adopted for the task. tar, cp, and rsync do almost everything. tar is making very rapid "images" of partitions, cp -r is used when preserving the structure is desirable (without having to make files 'disjoint' again), and rsync (in recursive mode) gets used to avoid having to plug the same drive into many different machines. Little by little we get one drive to "rule them all". Eventually, if all goes as planned, we'll have an encrypted drive offsite.
But the key point is, I didn't have to add any program to format the drive, to pass around files, or to "connect" machines. No GAFAM, no apt-get, no apt, no Debian mirrors.. certainly not Snaps or Flatpaks.
Why make life complicated when one command gets the job done and is likely work in the exact same way for decades to come (new versions will be backward-compatible)? I still use some of the very same backup commands that I used 20+ years ago. Only the paths changed because the physical drives are not the same.
There's a hidden message here about the merits of sticking with X (at least until Wayland reaches full compatibility or feature parity, which is highly improbable; it's not in the roadmap). █