I need to get my backup situation in order to avoid wasting time.
I ended up nuking my installation of pacman about halfway through the month trying to free up space on my paltry 64 GB drive, and I spent about a week on and off trying to fix it only to give up and nuke my otherwise perfect Arch Linux installation. Luckily, I had my home partition separate from the root partition, so I didn’t have to pointlessly migrate my files to a scratch disk (that I didn’t even have) and back. Thankfully, the problem was fixed, and getting back to a workable environment took only an afternoon.
The kicker here was all the programs and configuration outside of ~. I went installing programs as I went along, but there were many times where I didn’t have a mission critical program nor a means to download it (no internet at home). In hindsight, I could have learned how to use git repos earlier and had a master list of all of my installed programs ready to go, but I can’t help but feel that a bootable backup would be cleaner and faster in another doomsday scenario like this.
Following the 321 rule (3 copies of data, 2 local, 1 remote), I configured rsync to backup my media collection and personal data to a VPS and will probably pop into a local big box store for a hard drive in the coming days. Once I do, I can pick up where I left off with borg and fulfill my dream of having both bootable backups and file versioning (think Time Machine by Apple).