Backing Up a Raspberry Pi Home Directory (Without Hoarding 15 GB Forever)

Backups are one of those things everyone agrees are important—right up until disk space mysteriously vanishes and no one remembers what’s actually being backed up.

Today I cleaned up my Raspberry Pi desktop backup strategy and replaced a bulky ~15 GB backup with a compressed, verified, and reproducible archive weighing in at just 4.6 GB. Same data. Less entropy.

The Problem

I had previously backed up my Raspberry Pi home directory by copying it directly to an external drive. It worked, but it had a few flaws:

• No compression
• No clear snapshot date
• Included caches and trash
• Owned by root, which quietly blocked future writes

In short: functional, but sloppy.

The Fix

The goal was simple:
Create a compressed, timestamped backup of /home, store it on a mounted external drive, and verify it before touching the old backup.

The solution used good old tar with gzip compression, while excluding directories that don’t belong in backups (cache and trash):

```bash tar –exclude=/home/jimjamscozz22/.cache
–exclude=/home/jimjamscozz22/.local/share/Trash
-czvf /media/jimjamscozz22/Pi_Backup/pi_backups/home-2026-01-16.tar.gz
/home/jimjamscozz22