Customising and tweaking
Mint’s welcome screen has a few handy hints in its First Steps section. Most notably it would like you to set up System Snapshots, which you should do. Unlike traditional backups, these by default only back up system files, leaving it up to you to back up your home directory. The theory is that the user should have more of a clue about what’s in here and how important it is, so should manage that separately. Launch the program from the Welcome screen, choose RSYNC, and choose a schedule and frequency that suit your requirements and disk-space forecast. Mint recommends keeping five daily and five boot snapshots – so you can revert to, say, three boots ago before you broke everything, or yesterday, when all your troubles) seemed so far away. Snapshots are stored incrementally, so while the first one will pretty much double the size of your install, subsequent snapshots will only record changed files.
