pacdef VS aconfmgr

A new thing that made package management on Arch neater for me is pacdef.

Cool project! Have you explored pacdef? It seems to be that blessed middle ground between Arch and Nix.

This isn't quite what you are looking for, but you could consider a declarative package manager, which covers this use case as well. There's e.g. https://github.com/steven-omaha/pacdef

Establishing a backup strategy. I'm using BTRFS with snapper and a pacman hook that creates a new snapshot before each upgrade. With ext4 I used timeshift. Besides that, I save my arch configuration with aconfmgr and my files with borg

Since my last cloning I've setup aconfmgr and and systemd-homed. I've also been playing around with archinstall configs to partition the system with encryption how I like. In the future I'm planning to use archinstall and aconfmgr to setup a new system for me and then I'll copy over the backup of my home directory.

try this https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr

Have you tried aconfmgr? In addition to installing packages, it also tracks configurations in /etc and modified files.

For my backup I keep files in my home directory synced with my NAS via syncthing. For my system backup I don't actually backup up my system, I configure my system via aconfmgr and that config is stored in my home directory and synced to my NAS. Using aconfmgr to "backup" my system is extremely space effecient, my aconfmgr config is only 1.7 MB.

aconfmgr (in AUR) can be used to save and restore system configurations and installed packages. For user configuration you can use a dotfile manager like chezmoi (in repo).

I know you prefer backing up manually, but aconfmgr might be for you.

To get something closer to nix on arch I like to use aconfmgr.

For those who are not familiar with Arch's aconfmgr, well I have not used it before but just saw it in a post. But it seems to be a configuration manager for Arch. It tracks, manages, and restores your Arch Linux OS configuration.