Decided to roll with Opensuse Tumbleweed a while back which preconfigures snapper for you. Never used it or touched it before.
Did something stupid and bricked my install and could not figure out what was wrong. Saw I could boot to a snapshot, so I gave it a go. It worked and I restored it.
I will never go back. I’m sure this has been around for ages but this was a game changer for me. I’m so used to the old model of manual backups.
This is so very important. Snapshots are very helpful tools, and most if the time they’re exactly what you need to recover. Unfortunately they don’t help when the drive fails, or the machine is destroyed by flooding, or myriad other failure modes (human error nit being the least of them). Remote backups are vital if you want your data to survive those events.
Remote copies of the snapshots are a start, but leave you at the mercy of and bugs in the snapshot system, and usually more critically, you have to transfer the whole snapshot or delta, and can’t exclude data without first rearanging your mountpoints.
Lical snapshots and remote file backups give you the best of both worlds, making it easy to recover your data from pretty much any event.
A good backup doesn’t let you accidentally delete it.