I'm guessing this is about the backup not being guaranteed to be a consistent snapshot-in-time of the whole filesystem, since things can be changing while it's being made. Maybe just a note in the documentation to explain and warn of the potential problem would be appropriate. I use Back In Time to backup my system files. I think the Timeshift software included as standard with Linux Mint, which is recommended for backing up the system, works the same way and would have the same risk. The problem is not limited to system files. Software is very commonly installed in the home directory that could run into the same issue. I would avoid restoring a whole system if possible, but if I had to do that, and if the restored backup was broken due to a system update running during its creation, I would just restore an earlier backup and then selectively restore files from the later one. Derek Veit On Thursday, December 5th, 2024 at 12:55 AM, c.buhtz@posteo.jp <c.buhtz@posteo.jp> wrote:

Hello,

this is related to a user reporting problems with BIT. But backups his hole system.

https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/1h6x9ci/debian_12_apt_glibc_238_not...

I often encounter problem reports by users backup system files and restoring them back. We do know that BIT and any other backup solution is not intended to do things like this. An image software is better suited for use cases like this. I wonder if BIT might warn users if they try to add files/directories outside from $HOME to there include list?

Or simply when starting BIT in root mode the first time there could be a one-time-warning mentioning that BIT is not intended for full system backups and an image software should be used instead.

What do you think?

Regards, Christian