Howto: Backup and restore your system!

Nice thread - great points! I recently used mondo-rescue to backup my system after I did all the tweaking I wanted. I keep my data on a seperate partition and backed up my system to that partition and then backup my data to another place (off of my laptop). Works great. Did a restore for fun and no problems whatsoever with the system. I also think that mondo handles different HD geometries as well.
Ubuntu Rules!
:-P

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by epb613

The way I do it (so that you don't have to remake any directories):

Boot up off a live cd. Mount hda2 (my main partition).

type from anywhere: sudo tar cvzf /mnt/hda2/07052005.tgz /mnt/hda2/ --exclude=/mnt/hda2/07052005.tgz

Restore works basically the same way just now you don't have to remake the directories.

---

is there a way i can have this run once a week automatically?

Code:

---

tar cvpzf backup.tgz / --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/backup.tgz --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys

---

Is there any way to know previously how much space will be used by the tar file?

Thanks

Thanks for this guide,
I was looking for a long time now for a way to make a good backup.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by cutOff

Code:

---

tar cvpzf backup.tgz / --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/backup.tgz --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys

---

Is there any way to know previously how much space will be used by the tar file?

Thanks

---

Anyone? It would be very interesting to know it previously.

Is this HOWTO a good way to go about reformatting to install Breezy when it is officially released? I've been a Windows guy until the last few months (now 95% Linux!), so I've yet to have my first "format/reinstall" of Ubuntu (Kubuntu, specifically)... and I'm not quite sure the best way to go about it.

Is this the best way to do it? Obviously I wouldn't restore everything, but at least it should provide me with everything I'd need to get personal files and settings moved over right?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Heliode

Hi, and welcome to the Heliode guide to successful backing-up and restoring of a Linux system!

Most of you have probably used Windows before you started using Ubuntu. During that time you might have needed to backup and restore your system. For Windows you would need proprietary software for which you would have to reboot your machine and boot into a special environment in which you could perform the backing-up/restoring (programs like Norton Ghost).
During that time you might have wondered why it wasn't possible to just add the whole c:\ to a big zip-file. This is impossible because in Windows, there are lots of files you can't copy or overwrite while they are being used, and therefore you needed specialized software to handle this.

Well, I'm here to tell you that those things, just like rebooting, are Windows CrazyThings (tm). There's no need to use programs like Ghost to create backups of your Ubuntu system (or any Linux system, for that matter). In fact; using Ghost might be a very bad idea if you are using anything but ext2. Ext3, the default Ubuntu partition, is seen by Ghost as a damaged ext2 partition and does a very good job at screwing up your data.

1: Backing-up

"What should I use to backup my system then?" might you ask. Easy; the same thing you use to backup/compress everything else; TAR. Unlike Windows, Linux doesn't restrict root access to anything, so you can just throw every single file on a partition in a TAR file!

To do this, become root with

Code:

---

sudo su

---

and go to the root of your filesystem (we use this in our example, but you can go anywhere you want your backup to end up, including remote or removable drives.)

Code:

---

cd /

---

Now, below is the full command I would use to make a backup of my system:

Code:

---

tar cvpzf backup.tgz / --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/backup.tgz --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys

---

Now, lets explain this a little bit.
The 'tar' part is, obviously, the program we're going to use.

'cvpfz' are the options we give to tar, like 'create archive' (obviously),
'preserve permissions'(to keep the same permissions on everything the same), and 'gzip' to keep the size down.

Next, the name the archive is going to get. backup.tgz in our example.

Next comes the root of the directory we want to backup. Since we want to backup everything; /

Now come the directories we want to exclude. We don't want to backup everything since some dirs aren't very useful to include. Also make sure you don't include the file itself, or else you'll get weird results.
You might also not want to include the /mnt folder if you have other partitions mounted there or you'll end up backing those up too. Also make sure you don't have anything mounted in /media (i.e. don't have any cd's or removable media mounted). Either that or exclude /media.

EDIT : kvidell suggests below we also exclude the /dev directory. I have other evidence that says it is very unwise to do so though.

Well, if the command agrees with you, hit enter (or return, whatever) and sit back&relax. This might take a while.

Afterwards you'll have a file called backup.tgz in the root of your filessytem, which is probably pretty large. Now you can burn it to DVD or move it to another machine, whatever you like!

EDIT2:
At the end of the process you might get a message along the lines of 'tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors' or something, but in most cases you can just ignore that.

Alternatively, you can use Bzip2 to compress your backup. This means higher compression but lower speed. If compression is important to you, just substitute
the 'z' in the command with 'j', and give the backup the right extension.
That would make the command look like this:

Code:

---

tar cvpjf backup.tar.bz2 / --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/backup.tar.bz2 --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys

---

2: Restoring

Warning: Please, for goodness sake, be careful here. If you don't understand what you are doing here you might end up overwriting stuff that is important to you, so please take care!

Well, we'll just continue with our example from the previous chapter; the file backup.tgz in the root of the partition.

Once again, make sure you are root and that you and the backup file are in the root of the filesystem.

One of the beautiful things of Linux is that This'll work even on a running system; no need to screw around with boot-cd's or anything. Of course, if you've rendered your system unbootable you might have no choice but to use a live-cd, but the results are the same. You can even remove every single file of a Linux system while it is running with one command. I'm not giving you that command though! ;-)

Well, back on-topic.
This is the command that I would use:

Code:

---

tar xvpfz backup.tgz -C /

---

Or if you used bz2;

Code:

---

tar xvpfj backup.tar.bz2 -C /

---

WARNING: this will overwrite every single file on your partition with the one in the archive!

Just hit enter/return/your brother/whatever and watch the fireworks. Again, this might take a while. When it is done, you have a fully restored Ubuntu system! Just make sure that, before you do anything else, you re-create the directories you excluded:

Code:

---

mkdir proc
mkdir lost+found
mkdir mnt
mkdir sys
etc...

---

And when you reboot, everything should be the way it was when you made the backup!

2.1: GRUB restore
Now, if you want to move your system to a new harddisk or if you did something nasty to your GRUB (like, say, install Windows), You'll also need to reinstall GRUB.
There are several very good howto's on how to do that here on this forum, so i'm not going to reinvent the wheel. Instead, take a look here:

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthre...t=grub+restore

There are a couple of methods proposed. I personally recommend the second one, posted by remmelt, since that has always worked for me.


Well that's it! I hope it was helpful!
As always, any feedback is appreciated!

---

how would one go about making this into a cron job to happen at certan times? could it be made into a script some how?
thanks.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by dudinatrix

Is this HOWTO a good way to go about reformatting to install Breezy when it is officially released? I've been a Windows guy until the last few months (now 95% Linux!), so I've yet to have my first "format/reinstall" of Ubuntu (Kubuntu, specifically)... and I'm not quite sure the best way to go about it.

Is this the best way to do it? Obviously I wouldn't restore everything, but at least it should provide me with everything I'd need to get personal files and settings moved over right?

---

Well i was wondering the same thing.
But without being the expert on this im guessing you need to exclude some more directories in order for this to work ?
Basiclly i would say the backup should take home directories, and perhaps a few other directories (i dont know really) .. i would certainly love to keep my scripts ect so i dont have to set everything up again.

Anyhow hopefully somebody will be doing a howto on this when breezy is released early october :D

Looking forward to it :D

Hi all, well I tried it out last night, I copied and pasted from the first message (the second option cause I wanted more compression) into my terminal and away it went....

Not sure what happened, but I ended up with a 5 GB file, it didn't exclude anything (as I said above I copied and pasted from the first message)

Now when I go into "file browser" and try to delete the huge file the delete buttons are greyed out, so I can't even get rid of the file that was created..

Methinks I might just try copying my "home" folder to a fat32 partition and start all over again :) - might try Hoary instead of breezy this time..

(Yea, I new at this)

Regards - John...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by NZ-Wanderer

Now when I go into "file browser" and try to delete the huge file the delete buttons are greyed out, so I can't even get rid of the file that was created..

Methinks I might just try copying my "home" folder to a fat32 partition and start all over again :) - might try Hoary instead of breezy this time..

(Yea, I new at this)

Regards - John...

---

Hi John.
You probably can't delete the file you created, because when you ran the "backup" tar command, you probably used SUDO, right? So, it was acting on root's behalf. You however are simply your own regular user, when using File Manager (File Browser? - sorry, can't remember the name offhand). So, you can either change the permissions/ownership of the backup file you created, or...

If you just want to delete it, you can use the following command from the terminal, using SUDO again.
sudo rm /backup.tgz
* this assumes backup file called backup.tgz was created in root filesystem
modify it to whatever name/location you used