Dekkard@byttyrs @fosstodon late to the party but I think that if you just back up the folders in your home directory ( documents, music, etc) you should be fine. Doing a complete backup will include quite a few dot files that make up user prefs and that could be borking your reinstalls...
Jonkman Microblog is a social network, courtesy of SOBAC Microcomputer Services. It runs on GNU social, version 1.2.0-beta5, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All Jonkman Microblog content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.