Howto: Backup and restore your system!

[ric_spam]

My strategy is to use partimage to backup the whole system and then either rsync or tar to backup that which changes more often ie home directories.

In the user directories, there are a couple which I don't think need to be backed up

.beagle and .Trash

Given they are hidden, how do I properly format the --exclude clauses for either/or both tar & rsync?

I tried the ones I knew, tick, back-tick, double quote, wack with no success.

Currently on a newer install my home dir is at 600 MB, of which 300 is in .beagle.

TIA
UPDATE:

So, I got thru reading the many other pages on this topic and will draw your attention to posts #135, #150, #161 and #162. My error was not the incorrect format of the command line parse for the dot files, but rather that tar had changed.

Bad developer - no donut.

Someone asked a 'noob' question and I didn't see a reply. It was how to include the hidden or dot directories. Ans: they are included.

So while I am in the dir I want to save my backups to, /mnt/backup I ran this successfully
% tar cvpjf backup.tar.bz2 --exclude=.Trash --exclude=News --exclude=.beagle /home/me

.Trash is excluded cause I threw it away once already
.beagle - easily recreated and huge, relatively speaking
News - for Pan, and I regard usenet posts as transitory anyway.


Any other directories in /home that you might choose to not backup?


now I gotta scan back for those posts on samba 2 gig limitation ... ...

[hikaricore]

Thanks to this post I archived my system only hours before destroying it with the multicrash feature of the edgy upgrade process.

Just saying my thanks.

[aysiu]

I have a few questions about this. I use rsync to back up my /documents partition, but I want to use the method outlined in this thread for backing up my / partition.

I'm worried it will actually overwrite my /documents partition, though. Would something like this work? Also, any reason to

sudo su

first instead of just using one sudo command?

I would be using this for backup:

#!/bin/bash
sudo umount /documents
sudo su
cd /
tar cvpzf backup.tgz --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/backup.tgz --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys /
mount -a
exit

and then this to restore:

#!/bin/bash
sudo umount /documents
sudo su
cd /
tar xvpfz backup.tgz -C /
mkdir proc
mkdir lost+found
mkdir mnt
mkdir sys
mount -a
exit

I'm particularly worried about this since I have some items symlinked from /documents to my /home/username folder on the / partition. Would it bork my system to have symlinks from a partition that isn't mounted yet, even if the partition is going to be remounted later?

And there's no way Ubuntu could overwrite my /documents partition if the partition is unmounted, right?

[dmizer]

i can't get this sucker to exclude my media folder (where i have my server mounted) ... it keeps including all the junk from my server in my backup.

i have tried:

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

and

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

but still all the shared files are getting included in the tar. as you can see, i'm attempting to save the backup to my server (/media/server) so i can restore it from there when i get a new hard drive (current drive is showing signs of failing).

any way i seem to run this thing, i still get this:

/etc/idmapd.conf
/media/
/media/cdrom
/media/cdrom0/
/media/floppy
/media/floppy0/
/media/server/

which then proceeds to inculde everything on my server in the backup

[aysiu]

I read in some other thread that if you put / last that it will work--not sure what the difference is, though.

So it'd be something like this:

sudo su
cd /media/server/shared/backup/
tar cvpzf backup.tgz --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/media --exclude=/sys /

[hameda]

whats going on, i see all the files i wanted to exclude being included in the archive? whats going on. i am copying and pasting your commands??

i am struggling here

[dmizer]

I read in some other thread that if you put / last that it will work--not sure what the difference is, though.

So it'd be something like this:

sudo su
cd /media/server/shared/backup/
tar cvpzf backup.tgz --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/media --exclude=/sys /

that did the trick ... thanks.

[dmizer]

just restored my system. here's what i did:
backed up the entire system to my server. purchased a 60 gig hard drive to replace my ancient 6 gig hard drive that was beginning to show signs of wear.

installed the alternate server dapper on the new drive (backuped system was dapper) > copied backup file to the new hard disk > unziped as root > reboot = completely restored system in less than an hour's work (not including the walk to the parts store to purchase the new drive).

i didn't have to recreate any directories after the backup was done, and because i installed the server from scratch, i didn't have to restore grub.

only problem i've run into so far is that i had some kind of strange permissions problem related to the linux restricted modules package. i just reinstalled it and no more problem with that. man this new drive is fast! and it's very comforting not to hear loud clunking every 5 minutes or so.

[jromer]

As mentioned before, I had to read quite a bit of this thread to find out that there is a typo on the first post that causes a lot of confusion (to me anyways)...

the code is shown as...

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

when the "/" should be at the end of the command as follows:

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

I feel this should be edited. (I'm not the first to mention this).

Thanks

[OmahaVike]

here! here! to jromer's post.

i have been witness to *numerous* posts all indicating the same "slash at the end" solution. while it has been documented throughout this particular thread, i can sympathize with the posters in not wanting to read through all 24 pages. please save us the agony and edit the original post.