The real sauce in my infrastructure is simply 'generational' storage. No more clean installs with a backup dir of the system. All my data volumes get mounted into my machine/s as needed. I can swap out all my hard drives with new ones without any downtime too which is nice. I could reinstall my desktop each morning and it would barely set me back 15 minutes. If I also properly stored my general system settings as code (cfengine, puppet, chef, etc) I could practically just launch ephemeral desktop instances and have basically a native experience.
For me a long time ago an upgrade meant buy new hard drives, do a reinstall, and copy either the entire old drive or main data dirs onto the computer.
Now my data volumes are separate from the system. I used raid for redundancy on the physical machine with another drive for differential filesystem level backups (snapshot every day for 60 days with only differential storage cost, see rdiff-backup). When I upgrade I just add new drives, assign them into the raid, wait for them to sync, and remove the old drives. By generational I mean my storage and how I do things aren't going to change when I reset things like they used to. All my data is outside the system I'm using and must be attached.
I can for example, spin up an AWS machine, run the package install commands for the apps I normally use, VPN to my fileserver and mount my home directory and project volumes, and in quite literally about 15-30 minutes have the exact same environment as I do at my house. CFEngine et al would speed that up quite a bit.
You are welcome. I'd have to say the biggest benefit for me personally is the distinct separation and permanence leads me to keep it very organized. When I had my files 'in' my system the lines blurred and things got spread all over the place. I still keep my download dir on the base system and only things i really care about make it to the data drive so there isn't much pollution. I'm a bit scatterbrained in that regard and this method accidentally solved that.
Software raid with LVM. For my primary storage pool I created a raid1 pair, encrypted with an NVME cache drive, then created an LVM PV nested on that, LVM within LVM to dish out volumes that all share those lower level benefits.
