.....But.......a cron job associated with Clonezilla would be good.
Brian, the cron job is doable and Clonezilla is certainly a good product, as you and I know.
But (you know Wizard's but is never far behind him), from their website
Limitations:
- The destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one.
- Differential/incremental backup is not implemented yet.
- Online imaging/cloning is not implemented yet. The partition to be imaged or cloned has to be unmounted.
- Due to the image format limitation, the image can not be explored or mounted. You can _NOT_ recovery single file from the image. However, you still have workaround to make it, read this.
- Recovery Clonezilla live with multiple CDs or DVDs is not implemented yet. Now all the files have to be in one CD or DVD if you choose to create the recovery iso file.
... my highlighting.
Method used would have to be Partition to Partition or Partition to Image, and in the case of Partition to Partition, with low-level sector by sector cloning, his root partition would need to kept to something manageable such as 50GB or less, and then the Destination Partition would be filled in 10 operations.
@mpskinner until you go remote edit, a working solution might be provided with Timeshift, see my tutorial here
https://www.linux.org/threads/timeshift-similar-solutions-safeguard-recover-your-linux.15241/
You could perform a full, On Demand snapshot of your system with both User and Root covered, to begin with, and then schedule for incremental snapshots to be taken at set intervals. The incremental snapshots are hard-linked to the original full snap. Files deleted in between scheduled incrementals will be reflected, and so the latest incremental can be used as a base for restoring the entire system, should the need arise, incorporating the fact that files had been deleted.
Once you establish over an arbitrary period of time that the system is working as it should, you can then delete all snapshots from the USB drive, take a full snap, and continue on.
Not quite fully automated, but may be workable for you, you can see what you think.
Final disclaimer is that we have a number of Sysadmins within our ranks, and so people such as, but not limited to,
@Rob ,
@JasKinasis ,
@mal-2 , and others might to be able to provide input here to say
"Buzz off, Wizard,
this is what he needs"
Cheers
Wizard