[PLUG] Rsync advice needed

[John Jason Jordan]

Today the adapter to use my 1TB SSD in my new laptop arrove, and I have
it installed and mounted. So now I want to make some changes to the way
I do backups. A little preliminary info re my motivations will be
helpful.

I bought my very first computer in 1978, and ever since I have *never*
lost data due to a hard drive failure. Yes, I've had drives fail a
couple of times, but that the failure was imminent was always obvious in
plenty of time for me to make sure that my data was safe. And these days
all my drives have SMART data, which I check every few months or so.
Therefore, I have always followed the policy of making full backups only
when I am about to do something serious - like a dist-upgrade or such.

While I have never lost data due to a drive failure, at least once
every few months I accidentally delete a file that I shouldn't have.
This is exactly the problem that using Trash was supposed to alleviate;
i.e., you move it to the Trash instead of deleting it. It's been a
decade and a half since I used Windows, but that is always what I used
to do. Windows would not count the Trash as real, and if I needed the
space for a file save, it would make the space by deleting the oldest
files in the trash. Well, that's not how Linux seems to do things.
Imagine my surprise one day while new in my use of Linux when I got an
error message that a file could not be saved because I was out of room.
I thought I had hundreds of GB of free space, so I was sitting there
going 'WTH'? Ever since I have just never used the Trash.

But now I am considering setting up a cron job to do backups to the 1TB
SSD. I didn't do this before because my old computer had only 512G
for / and /home, and I often needed the SSD for storage. My new
computer has a 1TB NVMe for / and /home, and each partition is only
about 30% used, so I no longer need the SSD for storage.

The SSD is always mounted at /media/jjj/Data, set up in fstab. So I am
thinking of creating two folders on it, Root and Home, and create cron
jobs something like this:

0 3 * * * rsync -avx --delete / /media/jjj/Data/Root
0 3 * * * rsync -avx --delete /home /media/jjj/Data/Home

I probably haven't got the syntax quite right, and there may be things
in / that shouldn't be backed up. And I should probably make the second
one start half an hour later or so, or combine them somehow. (Cron
scares me; it was written for people far smarter than me.)

Added thought: This does not need to be a clone of the partitions with
dd or such. I just want to be able to recover a single file or folder
that I shouldn't have deleted.

Suggestions welcome!