Cool. So what I've found useful is to spend a little bit of time upfront to decide how you want to do your partitions, and what file systems. So, for example, I don't care about backing up projects (yay git) and their build artifacts, don't care about .cache, but do want backups of .config and my steam library. I use btrfs for snapshots, and btrfs send that to my NAS, but obviously a lot of stuff can be restored easily so that's bind mounts.
Or use LVM (with or without LUKs) and at least give yourself some wiggle room for later.
My little anecdote. I was watching a YT video where the guy spent 10 minutes explaining where to go to download and install python, git, and something else. The entire time I was cringing thinking that's a one liner.