If you haven’t played with Pulumi (for configuring cloud services) and Ansible (for local services, shell commands, apt installs etc) you may enjoy them as a way to capture / re-apply configuration.

I’d get familiar with deploying these with some infrastructure-as-code tools, and keep a git repo. Ansible is pretty easy to get started with.

Most of the time the VPS provider offers some backup solution. It's not only about your configuration files which can easily be recreated, but about all the user data like pictures databases, etc. Which once lost can't be recovered.

Best practice is a 3-2-1 backup: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/

But you could back up your stuff on your laptop if you want, it's not such a bad idea actually. For that you trigger the backup script from your laptop, you can do it automatically there too. This makes sure that the laptop is on while you're doing the backup.

The easiest way is a crown job and a bash file which runs a couple of rsync commands to get specific files and directories from the server via ssh.

A more involved way would be a backup system like restic, which does a lot of things for you but is a bit more involved to set up.

Ansible if you want to do it the right way.

Or keep all of your configs in one tree and use syncthing on it If you want to phone it in. Turn on versioning call it a night.

1. Create git repo
2. Put all config in git repo
3. Create repo on codeberg
4. Clone git repo to both VPS and laptop

No extra money needed

git add .
git commit -m "Updated config"
git push origin main

Look at tools like kopia and restic. Depending on how much data you have, it should be relatively cheap to back up to backblaze b2.

Etckeeper

Lots of good ideas.

I’m a fan of stow-like tools, but there are advantages to using something like Salt (or similar) if you’re dealing with VPSes that share don’t common configs like firewalls. There’s a lot to learn with things like salt/chef/puppet/attune/ansible, whereas something like yas-bdsm, which is what I’m currently using, is literally just:

1. Keep your configs in a git repos, in a structure that mirrors your target
2. Run a command and it creates symlinks for the destination files
3. Commit your changes and push them somewhere. Or just restic-backup the repos.

The config file formats are irrelevant; there’s no transformation logic to learn. Its greatest feature is its simplicity.

Better question: Have you looked into infrastructure as code? (IaaC) you can define everything in a Git repo and then create everything in a repeatable way.

I keep my server backups on a dedicated backup server.