Real system settings are "lost" during a migration or hardware failures, but I can install and configure a Linux system pretty quickly.
On a desktop machine, where little more than the network requires setting, perhaps, although having a full system backup will save you the time of downloading and installing your favorite distro. On a server machine, where you might have tons of email messages and web pages, large databases, and who knows what else outside /home, having only a backup of /home is a recipe for disaster.
But you hopefully store your web pages, emails and databases in a known location, which you can then backup the same way as the home directory (though backing up a database might be better done in the form of a database dump).
-- The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
These known locations suddenly start to add up. It's much easier to simply backup one known location, /, and be done with it. It's not as if you're going to backup all these files by hand; the computer will do it for you, and with incremental backup solutions, such as rsync or duplicity, even the computer doesn't have to do much work.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Thursday November 26 2020, @08:24PM (2 children)
On a desktop machine, where little more than the network requires setting, perhaps, although having a full system backup will save you the time of downloading and installing your favorite distro. On a server machine, where you might have tons of email messages and web pages, large databases, and who knows what else outside /home, having only a backup of /home is a recipe for disaster.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday December 01 2020, @09:06AM (1 child)
But you hopefully store your web pages, emails and databases in a known location, which you can then backup the same way as the home directory (though backing up a database might be better done in the form of a database dump).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by KritonK on Tuesday December 01 2020, @10:18AM
These known locations suddenly start to add up. It's much easier to simply backup one known location, /, and be done with it. It's not as if you're going to backup all these files by hand; the computer will do it for you, and with incremental backup solutions, such as rsync or duplicity, even the computer doesn't have to do much work.