Understanding backup options?

[Nathanael Young]

Hello fine people of the interwebs.
I'm fairly new to Xbian, Raspberry Pi and Linux, keen to learn though. I've been hitting various problems over the past few weeks trying to get this setup as a sensible replacement for my Apple TV. I'm currently undergoing a fresh install of Release Candidate 3, manually setting options and installing add-ons. I want to make sure I have a good backup system in place, and have some questions about the various options:
'Home Backup' - presumably backs up the contents of my home folder. What does/doesn't this include, and when would that be a useful backup to have?
'System Backup' - guessing this does everything? So would be a good candidate to restore from if I did a clean install at some point?
'Snapshot' - I gather this is useful for rolling back if a problem crops up, but are they any use (if I copied particular ones out) for restoring the full system settings from a clean install?
I also have the 'Win32 Disk Imager' which I have seen can be used to create a full image of the SD card.

- I'd like to create a backup of the system right now, before I've added my libraries, but including all of my add-ons and settings. Something I could use either to re-image the SD card quickly back to this state, or to quickly put a clean install back to my setup. Would be great if this could be future-compatible for later releases.
- I'd like to create a similar backup to the first but after my libraries are added and scanned.
- I'd also like to decide which auto-backup option is preferable just in case of SD card corruption or other failures

Setup: Raspberry Pi B, class 10 SanDisk SDHC, 2.1A powered USB Hub, Edimax Wifi adapter (http://www.ebuyer.com/220220-edimax-wireless-n150-nano-usb-adapter-compatible-with-raspberry-pi-ew-7811un)

Thanks in advance.
:-)

[josch]

Hey,

as I've only made use of the backup /home option yet, I can't tell you more about the others.
But because you are still waiting for an answer, i want to share at least how I handle the backup/restore thing:

If you have your Xbian system fully configured and all your favorite additional packages installed, creating
a full sd card image is a good way for backing up. I do it this way for myself too. After this point I don't
change anything on the system itself, all programs that I use, do save their data into /home/xbian.
So no matter if I change XBMC settings, add movies to the library, reconfigure pyLoad, or something
else - to backup my home dir is enough to keep all my changes/data.

So all I have to do for a full restore, is to write the image to the sd card, connect straight via SSH
(because wifi is already set up) and restore my home dir. It doesn't take any real time effort.
And if I did (rarely) some more changes to the system, I just create a new sd card image in 5min.

If you have the same usecase as me, I can recommend this method as I never had any problems with it.