I have tested a lot of atomic and traditional distributions lately. Tons of desktop environments strictly for fun and branching out. Having a 1 2 3 backup strategy and not just having it in place, but being able to restore your backup in a timely manner to keep continuity is paramount. You can list infinite reasons why.
Why do atomic distros which are supposed to me more stable, superior to some degree immutable environments lack good backup options? You can hack things together and there are somewhat installable tools. Like timeshift or etc etc. But it seems they place a lot more emphasis on rolling back poor updates in the event than total system backups.
By default it you should have true backups then layer in rollbacks. Not the other way around. Am I missing something?
Okay, so let me break down what I THINK is happening here, which is that you might have a misunderstanding of what what atomic/immutable means.
First, these are made to separate OSspace from UserSpace. Whatever you keep in UserSpace is your responsibility.
Second, the actual running OS is built on layers like containers. The hash of what your OSspace is can be readily gotten to compile the exact same version of it from the repos that hold the presompiled versions of these things. Just like containers.
Third, you don’t need to backup any of the OS because of the above.
Lastly, the general idea is that since you don’t need to backup anything about the OS, and you should be able to checkout a hash of some sort that can download and be eventually bit-consistant with the OS layer, all you have to worry about is the UserSpace content.
How you manage the UserSpace content is up to you. Back your stuff up, start a bare machine and check the OS out to a specific revision where your previous machine was at, then drop your UserSpace stuff in, and it will “just work”.