Howto: Backup and restore your system!

[kellyhardinguk]

I backed up my home directory, but when I try to open the archive, I get this error message:


I know that I typed the backup command into ternimal correctly. How come I can't open the archive?

Something went wrong with the creation or copying of the backup somewhere/how.

It is telling you it cannot read the file because it is shorter than it should be.

Did you get any errors whilst making the backup?

Is the file over 2Gb? if so what filesystem was it put on/copied to? IIRC FAT32 has a filesize limit of 2Gb/file.

Kelly

[xtacocorex]

I have this method set up in a shell script to back up my / and /home separately, but the exclude doesn't work anymore (it did with Hoary).

I tried changing the order in the tar command, but that still doesn't work.

I'm including the code for / (/home is pretty much identical, with the exception of different excludes)

#!/bin/sh

# This is a shell script to back up the root directory of my 
# computer and move it to an externally mounted harddisk for
# storage
#
# To restore root system backup, use resbkrt

# Get current directory
mycurrdir=`pwd`

# Change to /media/hd?
cd /media/usbdisk/backups

# Clean out /var/cache/apt/archives
echo "Cleaning apt-get cache"
sudo apt-get clean

# Exclude variables
ex1="--exclude=/home --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found"
ex2="--exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys"
ex3="--exclude=/tmp --exclude=/media"
#ex4="--exclude=/var/cache/apt/archives"

# Create .tgz backup file as superuser
# Don't need to include /home -> to be done in a different script
echo "Creating backup archive"
sudo tar cvpzf rootbackup-`date +%F`.tgz $ex1 $ex2 $ex3 / 

# Go back to original directory
cd $mycurrdir

[xtacocorex]

This is definately odd as my script now works with the excludes.

[PokerFacePenguin]

EDIT: There are few mistakens in the command line invoking tar to backup system, that are wrote in the first post. For some reason on certain versions of tar excluding of directories doesn't work. After my search on the google groups I found that these paths should look like that:

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

The only change is that the path that shows what should be backuped is at the end.

This change applies to bzip2 "version" respectively.

EDIT2: There's one more thing, this time about restoring the backup. Although there is an 'p' option given for preserving files modes, there is no option given to preserve same owner as of original files. Without it all of the files unpacked from the archive will become owned by the user who made unpacking. To prevent this we should add --same-owner option to the command line when unpacking. This, in most cases, will bring out some errors - that's when we are non-root user and want to set file owner to root. To prevent this, whe should run tar with sudo tool.

I believe this should be included as a footnote in the original post. The --exclude stumped me for a bit. Nice HOWTO.

[tsugaguy]

i'm a complete linux idiot but i hate windows enough to keep trying this. could somebody give us a revised version of the 2 commands from the first post above so that they exclude whatever dev folders there are that waste space or cause problems? it would be a great help! t hanks!!!!!!!!!!

[daller]

I have installed mondo from the repos!

How do I run it?

[nicholaspaul]

I have installed mondo from the repos!

How do I run it?

Personally, I would "do a search and check out the guides" .
I Googled "mondo linux" and found http://www.mondorescue.org

[galgoz]

Ok, I had a system that was Dual Boot WinXP and Ubuntu. I made my backup of Ubuntu following these directions and burned it to DVD. I then did the following:

1. Deleted all partitions
2. Reinstalled Ubuntu 5.10
3. Copied tar image to /
4. Restored the image using the command in the first post
5. Rebooted

Or I should say I tried. It just sat at >Grub

I had no idea what to do. So I deleted the partitions and reinstalled Ubuntu 5.10 again.

That is where I am now? Should I try the restore again? I didn't recreate the directores that were excluded but I don't think I needed to as they should have been created by the fresh installation right?

[shane2peru]

Ok, first thanks for the HOWTO it was a great and very extremely helpful guide! I had to completely re-install Ubuntu. I then restored by backup that was over 3GB! It worked like a charm twice. (The first time I forgot to use sudo ) so it took about an hour to restore my home partition, and then got to the root, and well, didn't have write permissions. The second time worked like a charm.
Now, my only problem is that my little sound icon by the clock has an ugly x over it. I do have sound, but it gives me this error when I click on it,

 The volume control did not find any elements and/or devices to control. This means either that you don't have the right GStreamer plugins installed, or that you don't have a sound card configured.

You can remove the volume control from the panel by right-clicking the speaker icon on the panel and selecting "Remove From Panel" from the menu.

If I right click on it and select open I get this error,

Registry is not present or it is corrupted, please update it by running gst-register

When I attempt to run gst-register it in the terminal I get this

bash: gst-register: command not found

Any ideas? Oh, also I didn't have this problem before my backup. Thanks!

Shane

[pauljwells]

I had the same problem, gst-register worked though and solved it. gst-register is part of libgstreamer0.8-0 Just run synaptic and install it and you should be sorted.