@Moem Thanks for your input, backing up your home directory is definitely a great idea and is what people normally opt for.
Below I'll try and summarise what I've learnt for solving my problem, which might help people facing a similar problem.
Please remember I have not tried restoring yet to see if every single thing on the list was backed up, the one thing that's certain is if you have files in the home directory and you back up that, those are safe (you can always check they successfully made it to your computer by browsing inside the folder).
Backing up your home directory
- Connect phone to computer.
- Make sure the
adb command is working (run adb devices to see if there's any output etc.).
- Run
adb pull /home.
You should receive some output about whether all your files made it to your computer, and obviously you can check for yourself by browsing them on your PC.
Why should I backup userdata instead of just home?
If you want to take it a step further, I'd recomment backing up the entire userdata folder, which also contains the home folder mentioned previously: as far as I've been able to gather just by asking other users on UBPorts' Telegram servers, this includes the items on the list below.
Things inside userdata which are useful to back up
- the settings you changed in the settings app
- your fingerprints for unlocking your phone
- the apps currently installed on your device
- the apps' data: for example, all the apps and everything else needed to run your Waydroid container exactly in the state it is in now
- packages installed via
nix and snap
Backing up userdata
Do the same but run adb pull /userdata.
Basically if you ever lose your userdata you just need to replace your current /userdata folder on your phone with the previous backup of /userdata on your computer.
While I would probably simply run something like adb shell 'rm -rf /userdata && mkdir -p /userdata' && adb push /path/to/userdata /userdata for restore, do not run it unless you know what you're doing, I have not verified this to be working and need to check with people more knowledgeable than me on UT to confirm/fix.
This is the best I have for now, I'll update / add to this if I come across anything better 