Re: Howto: Backup and restore your system!
Originally Posted by
jal
my, what a thread! Started May 17th, 2005
would make it about as old as
El_Belgicano's "old" ASUS, wouldn't it?
Yes it does, but just like my old lappy, this method still rocks...
I only modified the excluded items, and this method is "Lucid Lynx approved"...
Originally Posted by
startling
Interesting thread. I see there's a bit of the Terminal versus GUI argument going on.
It's a simple question of whether you want Ubuntu to be more popular and used by more people. If you do - and I very much do - then fundamental things must be made simpler! Geeks and power users will always have the power to do what they want with Linux, but the vast majority of computer users are not and never will be geeks.
I've used Ubuntu for a while now and very much prefer it to Windows but there are some niggles and this is a case in point.
On my Windows Xp box, I installed Cobian Backup (a version of which is open source, by the way) and after a few clicks it was backing up my important files twice a day to an external drive. In less than 10 minutes the job was done and I don't need to think about it any more. This shows me how easy it can be.
On Ubuntu, by contrast, I have spent several hours Googling looking into ways to back up my files and I still don't have a satisfactory system in place (hence why I'm browsing this thread). There's not a single GUI program which compares to Cobian and that really surprises me. I know there's great software like grsync and rsync and cron and so on, but it looks to me as though it will take several hours to understand them properly and write and configure scripts and so on, and even then there are pitfalls such as backing up Truecrypt volumes. So until I get the time to go into this in detail I'm manually dragging and dropping files using Nautilus - which I realize is a crazy way to do backups!
I strongly believe an easy GUI backup program similar to Cobian would be a boon for Ubuntu.
Then stick with Windows. Most people went to Ubuntu because they want change, others because they want more control over what is installed, or how it behaves and they found out GUI apps did not give them that kind of power, the terminal is the way they control a lot of things...
If you want a GUI, get one, but at the bottom, they all will make up a command for tar to use... So why wouldn't you make the command up yourself, the first post gives you one to copy-paste, easy enough for what it has to do...
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.
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