After this time I must have tried Kopia (via KopiaUI) at least a dozen time and every single time I have never been able to figure out in one glance how it works. A brief idea I have is that you pick a folder and pick where to backup/snapshot it to. There is no (or at least an easy and intuitive) way to have a local backup setup of a set of folder, exclusions, inclusions, a config where you can decide the frequency, retention etc. I did try hard to find that out but nothing. I think it's their deliberate design choice and that's fine - but at least from usability perspective it's anything that is even in the direction of backup tools like restic/backrest, borg/vorta etc.
Having dug into Kopia config today, I realized that much of this is controlled by a policy, or several policies. The fun part is that the policies live in the repository, there's no obvious way to have it as local files. It makes sense, I suppose, if you have a bunch of similar machines (e.g. workstations) that must follow the same policy, and put their backups to the same repository.
