Copying home folder to external drive

My home machine is a Mac Mini M2 Pro running Sonoma. I also have a Macbook Air that I use when traveling. Prior to going on the road, I usually merge my "Projects" folder on the home machine into the one on the Air so I have the latest versions of work in progress on the road. I also copy the home directory to a large USB drive that I carry with me in case I need other items. Prior to Sonoma, I simply dragged the icon from the finder sidebar to the top level of the disk and, in half an hour or so, It was done.

Today, nothing happened when I tried this and looking in this forum, it seems to no longer be possible to do this. My work around, which seems to be working, was to open the home directory in the finder, do a CMD-A to select all, then a "Copy" then move the new directory I set up on the external drive and do a "Paste." This got a warning about the "Library" folder, so I omitted it. As far as I can tell, it has worked, mostly. Files beginning with . are not copied and links that depend on things in my home network being mounted are ignored. In addition, some pictures files are different, possibly because I accessed them during the copy. These are things I don't need for my purposes, so I think it will do. In the future, I'll write a script to exclude things I know I won't need on the road.