

Exactly, that is the one thing I hardly ever see mentioned in such threads and legitimately the one I worry about the most. There will always be a way to install apps other than the playstore, but the harder it will be, the less people will bother and the more developers will be forced to go via the appstore anyway.






You are probably technically right about rsync, and I had used rdiff-backup for many years actually instead. But I do think there is a different use case for each, depending on what you are backing up.
E.g. if it is files that change a lot, like documents or other text files. Rdiff-backup will be better, keeping old versions of them automatically ready for restoring.
But if it concerns backing up music, videos and also images (unless you edit them but then you’d probably save a new file as well), there doesn’t seem to be much difference to rsync anymore. Those files do not change, so an incremental backup won’t really add any value.