I had USB drive. These are the steps to use to back up all my /home/me to the disk.
First I formatted the disk. Use lsblk command to find the disk, then did
>sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 [sudo] password for me: mke2fs 1.47.3 (8-Jul-2025) /dev/sda1 contains a ntfs file system labelled 'WD_BLACK' Proceed anyway? (y,N) y Creating filesystem with 1953506048 4k blocks and 244191232 inodes Filesystem UUID: c86d2d6a-6f9a-4b82-8f12-e1f5606c0cea Superblock backups stored on blocks: 32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968, 102400000, 214990848, 512000000, 550731776, 644972544, 1934917632 Allocating group tables: done Writing inode tables: done Creating journal (262144 blocks): done Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done #this is the command to mount sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb #do this below ONLY very first time. This will make the backup owned by me #do not need to do this after first time. #and not root cd /mnt sudo chown -hR me:me usb >mkdir /mnt/usb/home >mkdir /mnt/usb/home/me #this is the command for backup >rsync -aXAH --delete --info=progress2 --no-i-r /home/me/ /mnt/usb/home/me 218,080,111 0% 71.46MB/s 0:00:02 (xfr#2363, to-chk=20132874/20181006) file has vanished: "/home/me/.config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/Default/Sessions/Session_13397846758118404" 310,456,164 0% 783.36kB/s 0:06:26 (xfr#2690, to-chk=0/20181006) rsync warning: some files vanished before they could be transferred (code 24) at main.c(1338) [sender=3.4.1] #anytime want to make backup, now just issue the above again.
So anytime to back all my /home/me just do the above command. Make sure to mount the usb disk after rebooting.