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Thread: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

  1. #1071
    Join Date
    Jun 2010
    Location
    New Delhi, India
    Beans
    8
    Distro
    Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

    Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

    This is a great tut!

  2. #1072
    Join Date
    Jun 2010
    Location
    USA
    Beans
    1
    Distro
    Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

    Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

    I wanted to register to say thank you for the tutorial.

  3. #1073
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Beans
    13

    Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

    Piratesmack,
    Very clever to let the computer handle mounts. The script --excludes fail, however, because tar strips off the initial slash to allow for portability in restores. So the --exclude variable fails to match tar's name for the mount point. Running $e through cut -c2- solves this.
    I'm happily using your script. Got any more good ideas to simplify backups?
    Thanks, John

  4. #1074
    Join Date
    Mar 2010
    Beans
    38

    Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

    This is a really excellent guide. Some of the variations in the comments are also interesting. However, in addition to excluding /mnt I think that /media should be added as well. Most of the devices & partitions that are automatically mounted show up in /media, and the first time I tried this I had an external hard drive hooked up, which the backup included of course. That took a long time, and I ended up with a much larger file!

  5. #1075
    Join Date
    Feb 2010
    Location
    QLD, Australia
    Beans
    497
    Distro
    Kubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

    Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

    Is there anything that should be considered in using this method to back up a MS Windows partition? I recently tried it on a fresh install of windows xp (I used puppy linux to run the commands though due to not having a copy of ubuntu on the machine or cd at hand), to then test if it could be restored correctly, I formatted C: drive so that windows was removed. I then proceeded to restore the back up. I was able to boot into windows again and it seemed to be working fine. To be on the safe side I ran a defrag and scheduled chkdsk scan for the next reboot. It ran the chckdsk scan and took its time doing so. when it finnished it restarted. Then I saw it..... That common thing that goes hand in hand with Windows.... That part of Windows that seems to plague me like a bad smell.... the BSOD...

    Was there something that I'm missing? Is there sure way to use this to back up windows with out it going bad?

    The reason I'm asking is that I was hoping to be able to use this method to go and back up computers for a number of people.
    Ubuntu 16.04 / Linux 18
    “To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows
    box, you just need to work on it”.

  6. #1076
    Join Date
    Feb 2010
    Location
    QLD, Australia
    Beans
    497
    Distro
    Kubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

    Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

    **Update From My Last**
    Just wondering if this could be an issue with the time and dates? I noticed last night when copying a one of my copy's of Ubuntu to another HDD (in the same method), that it was coming up with errors to do with the time because the time and date wasn't set correctly in on the machine that I was copying to. It was sying that the files were in the future. I stopped the extraction, set the date to the correct time and date and started again and it went fine.

    I'm not sure if the time and a date was an issue on the other machine cause I didn't even think about it. But is it possible that this has caused the issues with windows or is just that windows can't be recopied in such a way?
    Ubuntu 16.04 / Linux 18
    “To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows
    box, you just need to work on it”.

  7. #1077
    Join Date
    Mar 2010
    Beans
    21

    Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

    My brain is in overload mode......but def this thread has helped out as my terminal is cooking away. Just hope I have enough space for the file....

    Would like to know how I could just do this command and have it put the backup file directly to my external back up drive.

    This community rocks!

  8. #1078
    Join Date
    Aug 2006
    Beans
    22
    Distro
    Ubuntu 6.06

    Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

    I read through page 20 or 30 and had a quick question on the restore process...

    I tarred my root directory of my freshly configured laptop, excluded many of the suggestions like /mnt, /media, /dev, /sys, ect..

    If I were to reinstall Ubuntu, then copy my backup over the root directory, should I be back to ground zero? Such as my wireless and graphics drivers loaded and configured? or will I need to do some more work to get it running right again?

    I'll keep reading, maybe I'll get an answer faster than it'll take me to read through 103 pages..

    Excellent tutorial btw..
    _________| This can help
    new to linux.__| Videos

  9. #1079
    Join Date
    Jul 2010
    Beans
    1

    Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system! (/dev handling)

    Regarding /dev this information is derived from the linuxfromscratch.org LFS book.

    Although the /dev system is populated on-the-fly with modern systems, there are a couple of device nodes that should be available early in the boot process, and ought to exist before /dev is populated. Therefore, neither excluding /dev or backing it up directly is optimal.

    If you exclude /dev, you should manually create a /dev/console device node, and /dev/null device node using the appropriate arguments to mknod when you restore the system.

    mknod -m 600 /dev/console c 5 1
    mknod -m 666 /dev/null c 1 3

    alternatively, you could use a rescue boot and mount your "production" system under it before doing the backup. This will ensure you have the /proc and /sys directories created with proper permissions and without live-generated files, as well as /dev and required boot-time device nodes.

  10. #1080
    Join Date
    Oct 2005
    Beans
    572
    Distro
    Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

    Lightbulb Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!

    Moral of the story is, while you can backup a whole partition while live, don't. You'll need another live OS to restore anyway. Ubuntu has live CD's. Be careful of old CD conflicts.

    Then, there are alternatives to backing up everything. While not as inclusive, it saves space and mostly (transfer) time. This will of course, not save system tweaks however, after a restore. Just your stuff. It also requires you to decide what's important to you; but this could simply be /home.

    Any OS needs a clean install anyway, eventually (Yeah, I know about Debian). Fortunately that's fast with Ubuntu (and covers GRUB and other changes). Maybe we are best planning for restoring just the things we can't live without, to our new install.

    Where things can get hairy, is this might seem fine, with your originals and one backup; but it is recommend that we have a second backup (one on different drive, one at different local).

    Now, if you work with (change/use) any or either of the two backups (because not everything works remotely networked to the original) and also change the original files, as well, which changes are the changes you want to keep/backup? Can we rely on the time stamps? What if you reorganize directories? At best, you'll get duplicates. How can we do that; without redoing the whole time consuming backup and after all changes are moved to where we want them. Do we have that larger storage space? That (not just the changes) is much slower to backup onto external drives (so sometimes doesn't get done). This promotes not keeping current, and potential loss of your newest data. What do we answer; when a backup asks to resolve a conflict? An important change, AKA important data, could get lost.

    So, don't use your backups except to restore or test, change your originals only. We need automatic backup of our changes; to two places.
    Last edited by Neobuntu; July 14th, 2010 at 10:17 PM.

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