And for the backup-case: Whitelisting is usually a futile idea to begin with. Normally you'd prefer to backup the odd superfluous file rather than miss an important one.
Luckily most of the apps used on Linux systems now use it
Excuse me?
$ find ~ -maxdepth 1 -name ".*" | wc -l
228
$ find ~/.local | wc -l
4
$ uname
Linux