Yes, and while we're at it, let's get rid of the keyboard altogether! You don't need to be able to enter arbitrary words. All you need to do is browse the web, upload photos, and poke people. If you can't say it by clicking on one of the dozen emoticons provided, then you don't need to say it!
El Belgicano
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Laptop: 5 years old Asus M6N (ATI9600/9700 graphics, 512Mb RAM, Intel Mobile 1.66GHz, 60Gb HDD) running 10.04-Lucid Lynx pretty nicely.
my, what a thread! Started May 17th, 2005
would make it about as old as
El_Belgicano's "old" ASUS, wouldn't it?
my 2 cent's worth:
a GUI window is not the way to manage a system. All important system changes must be done (and even logged) via a terminal session, using pre-tested and proven script (which can be just a cut'n'pasted line); a series of screen shots showing which buttons to press is _not_ going to be testable. A list of ambiguous button descriptions is even worse.
My twopennyworth (OK I am English!).
The problem is that for us mere mortals who have graduated to Ubuntu from that unmentionable operating system, system windows are a bit daunting. I have tried, and made a mess of things on occasion (I managed to get two different installations of the same program in different places when I discovered that I should be using a Debian source rather than a tar ball. It took a while to realise where I had gone wrong, and longer to get it right!).
So, I now backup all of my data to an external drive, using the Archive manager, and, if I have to restore the system, will do a clean install then restore the data. Not the most elegant solution, but perhaps the easiest.
Barry
A near novice where Ubuntu is concerned!
Currently using 22.04
Strenuously disagree. Please remove words "Not" and "but". Also, tupence is worth far more the 2 cents.
The reason I was exploring this thread is, I was about to upgrade and thought I might push the the home partition off to backup before hand in case I had to re-install.
I'll probably go with partimage, as it's definitive and offline, but tar was a definite possible. In the last century some old farts might have gone with dump.
I was reading
http://www.debianadmin.com/backup-ba...of-backup.html
and came across the phrase:
relative to dump... it gave me pause to think.it must be restored to a similar disk with same disk geometry and bad blocks in same places. Watch out for this.
If this is true then I might not be able to restore to a different disk.
I used tar to backup and restore a fedora system. I think I had to tweak the OP a little bit to exclude some files or something, but it did work. There is also a utility called PAX (I think that's it) that I used later which was easier to use. Clonezilla proved to not be very good for disks that have bad sectors.. it could not make a copy yet I popped in acronis and it copied the data just fine to a new system and the new system worked great (obviously, nothing too important sat on those bad sectors)
When it comes to home backups I prefer my data is not encapsulated. I'll tell you why. Sometimes an archive is corrupt. If individual files on the backup media are somehow corrupt, it's possible the rest of the files will be fine. I've seen people have a single archive file being overwritten only to later discover the last archive written didn't finish or was corrupt leading to huge headaches. I want data I know I can get to and I want multiple medias to resort to! Multiple archive files could also provide some protection if that's the only way permissions can be preserved.
A lot of people worry too much about system files, unless there is some crazy custom software stuff going on, I just worry about config files and the data. One other thing about backups is make sure you're backing up SQL databases correctly by unlocking or exporting the database.
Last edited by needhelppeeps; October 11th, 2010 at 11:04 AM.
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