In your opinion what's the best way to do and restore full backups of a Linux server?

Mine is 3-pronged:

1. btrfs + snapper takes care of most level-1 situations, and I take a snapshot of every /root change, plus one nightly /home snapshot. but it's pretty demanding on disk space, and doesn't handle drive failure; so I also do
2. restic + USB drive, which I can cram way more snapshots onto, so I keep a couple of weeks of daily snapshots, one monthly snapshot for a year, and one snapshot per year, going back several years. I currently have snapshots from my past 3 computers on one giant drive. However, these drives can also fail, and won't protect me from burglary or house fire, so I also do
3. restic + BackBlaze. I just take a nightly snapshot for every computer and VM I manage. My monthly B2 bill is around $10. The VMs don't change much, and I only snapshot data and config directories (only stuff I can't spin up fairly quickly in a container, or via a simple install command), so most of the charge comes from a couple of decades of amateur digital photography, and an archive of all our digital music (because I'll be damned if I'm going to spend weeks re-digitizing all those CDs).

The only "restore entire system b/c of screwing up the OS" is #1. I could - and probably should, make a whole disk snapshot to a backup drive via #2, but I'm waiting until bcachefs is more mature, then I'll migrate to that, for the interesting replication options it allows which would make real-time disk replication to slow USB drives practical; I'd only need to snapshot /efi after kernel upgrades, and if I had that set up and a spare NVME on hand, I could probably be back up and running within a half hour.

I just stop my containers and tar gzip their compose files, their volumes and the /etc folder on the host

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 16 acronyms.

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I use proxmox and proxmox backup server (in a vm). I reinstall them both, and re-add lxc and vm and their drives from backup. has already worked once.

important files are additionaly synced to laptop and phone using syncthing.

proxmox backups (which are encrypted) are rcloned to backblaze for offsite backup

Relax and Recover for bare metal backup of the OS critical components and directories, and Deja Dup (or Gnome Backup) for user files

I found UrBackup to be very easy to use. Very little nitty-gritty setup and configuration required to get started. I have a feeling those with more experience will (rightly) pick apart if I’m missing something egregiously bad about it, but it worked for my small homelab use cases.

Rclone with crypt option, to any super cheap cloud storage.

Don't. Backup data, reinstall software.

Answer.