Absolutely correct. I used to maintain vigorous whole disk backups, and made sure my MacBook also had regular Time Machine backups and that kind of thing.

Then I realized there are actually tiers of important data. The most important stuff would be on the order of megabytes (tax documents, my lease, historical records of that stuff, and config files that I’ve built up over time).

Then I have my vacation photos and videos. Family photos. A few gigabytes. That’s not that much in the grand scheme and it’s still easy to back these up to a cloud service for minimal to no cost.

The rest of the data on my computer is easily recoverable or can be reconstructed with minimal effort. The OS install. The games. Media from online. I would not bother backing up this stuff.

Once this stuff is in perspective it’s very easy to devise a backup solution that fits your needs at an appropriate price. Not everyone has usage like mine and maybe their important data is much larger than mine is, but the point is we should think about which of the data is actually important, and not blindly duplicate pointless data.

A virtual machine on my LAN that runs Fedora Server