> First thing to do, is to create a new "homedir" inside the OS-provided homedir. I want my homedir to be immediately backup-able, and unfortunately most OSs spam the system homedir with various nonsense, e.g. applications (on Mac, Chrome installs (or used to) in `~/.ApplicationData`, on Linux, there's various package managers' binary caches, ...). I used to name this `home` but next time I'll name it `my`, less confusing.

What's really bullshit about this is the mixing of crap you wouldn't want to back up and actual user-relevant documents and config. The lowest-friction use of a bunch of programs will end up putting config you might want to keep, or documents, in your actual '~/' (say, "~/Documents"), but as you point out tons of stuff that you don't want ends up in there, too. At this point we almost need two "home" environment variables on unixy systems (and Windows has the same problem, of course). Another issue that's mostly Linux-specific (maybe the BSDs, too?) is the way someone who's not even that into sysadmin junk may end up with a few files in '/etc' that they'd like to back up, when really those aren't intended for use by any other users on the system (of which there may well be no other human ones) and could go in the home dir or somewhere else segregated from package-manager-sprayed, untouched-by-the-user noise.

One IDE I used likes to dump hundreds of megabytes of binary crud in there, with names suggesting it's an actual copy of the IDE rather than anything useful. Run two or three configurations of the IDE and goodbye at least a gigabyte.

I dare not even look at what the browsers are doing.

Yes, I do not want gigabytes of cache files in my homedir.

There’s stuff in the normal homedir you want to back up.

Better to maintain an exclude list:

https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/hacks/src/branch/master/osxbackup/...

https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/hacks/src/branch/master/osxbackup/...

Has it ever occurred to you that keeping your stuff backed up should be easier than it is?

This is also my approach. I create one dir called myuserfiles and one dir called myuserdotfiles. The main home is used as a temp that gets sorted and docs/pics/videos get put in the correct dirs every few weeks.

One of the things I do that others might find interesting is that anything not being worked on in my gitprojs dir is sent back to the appropriate ~/myfiles/progs/$language dir. So all my ansible stuff is in one place, all my bash scripts are in one place, etc.

Also while I am an emacs person and I like dired, I have converted to ranger as my file manager and it is quite awesome.

I started doing the above at a job where IT warned me that they could and would nuke my hard drive 'if needed' so anything not on the backed up network drive could just up and go away. It's nice because you can just copy the whole thing over to another computer.

Thanks for sharing this, I'm kind of shocked I haven't encountered it before. Definitely adopting it.