Howto: Backup and restore your system!

[herbster]

Nevermind

[cubanresourceful]

Is there a way to make it, so that on start-up, it scans the a folder, lets say Audio, and compares it or something, and if there is a difference, then update backup.tgz? Just wondering.

[latebeat]

Hi, and welcome to the Heliode guide to successful backing-up and restoring of a Linux system!
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EDIT : kvidell suggests below we also exclude the /dev directory. I have other evidence that says it is very unwise to do so though.

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Just writing to note that I followed a similar guide that said not to include /dev and the system didn't boot. However that was only because u need to recreate the device nodes with a live cd after. see:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t...ighlight-.html

if u have similar problems

[aniskop]

Hi, and welcome to the Heliode guide to successful backing-up and restoring of a Linux system!
....
As always, any feedback is appreciated!

Hi

I tried your backup and after recovery and after recovery I cannot switch from X to ttys.

That's my second try - I tried backup and recovery on other box with different configuration.

I tried recreate

mknod tty0 c 4 0

but Ctrl + Alt +F1 doesn't work

Any ideas??

Thanks
Peter

[joel_gil]

Hello everyone, 1st of all, GREAT GUIDE

i got to do the backup file with no probs, as well as resotre it.. kinda

it overwrote al the files as expected and once i rebooted when i hit on the ubuntu OS on the grub it says "error 17: unable to mount partition, select another OS"

i made the backup some weeks ago and durin that time i reformatted my computer and moved the linux partition (it was on sda4, now its on sda3) i guess that could be the reason... but again i have no idea

anyone who knows how to fix it?

thanks in advanced

[kilou]

I'm using Feisty and wanted to use a separate home partition to keep my settings for future clean installs. Previously when I was using home on the root partition I was backing up the system using this TAR command and everything was fine (backup AND restore):

sudo tar -cvpzf backup.tgz --one-file-system $exclude_list /

with exclude_list="
--exclude=/lost+found/*
--exclude=/tmp/*
--exclude=/var/tmp/*
--exclude=/var/log/*
--exclude=/var/cache/apt/archives/*.*
--exclude=/home/user/.Trash/*
--exclude=/home/user/.thumbnails/*
--exclude=/root/.Trash/*
--exclude=/root/.thumbnails/* "

Now that /home is on a separate partition I had to change the TAR command. I decided to create one backup file for root and another separate backup file for /home. The backup file for root filesystem is:

sudo tar -cvpzf backup_root.tgz --one-file-system $exclude_root /

with exclude_root="
--exclude=/lost+found/*
--exclude=/tmp/*
--exclude=/var/tmp/*
--exclude=/var/log/*
--exclude=/var/cache/apt/archives/*.*
--exclude=/root/.Trash/*
--exclude=/root/.thumbnails/* "

Since /home is on another filesystem this backup effectively doesn't include it since I use the option --one-file-system.

I then did some tests, format the root partition (untouching /home that was on a separate partition and working, I didn't delete it!) and then booting from the LiveCD I restored the root file system from the above TAR command. Everything appears to work correctly when untarring but when I reboot the system hangs on the Ubuntu boot image (the bar that represent boot process stay at the beginning. I tried several times and always get the same results. I also tried to remove the --one-file-system option in the TAR command and add --exclude=/home/* to the exclude_root list (see above) but always get the same results: the system is able to boot with Grub, load the Ubuntu boot image but the boot process stops.

I also tried to launch Ubuntu in recovery mode to see where it hangs and the boot stops after loading USB drivers.

Do you know what Iam doing wrong? It seems that it's impossible to backup and restore a root partition if home is on another partition (untouched).... The backup was saved on an EXT3 volume so the permissions are stored.

Any advice would be appreciated. I'd like to solve this problem before going with a proper install of Feisty and tune all parameters. Thanks!

PS: I'm restoring from a LiveCD to the root partition (sda1) with:

#Mount root partition
mkdir /mnt/restored_root
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/restored_root

#Restore root system
tar xvpfz backup_root.tgz -C /mnt/restored_root

[phidia]

This looks like an excellant guide-unfortunately I have the same situation as kilou-my home is on a separate partition. I just had an unbootable system and couldn't fix it I had a back up of etc,var, boot, and usr/local but it didn't help at all. (i think etc was corrupted already when I did the backup) IMO there needs to be a simple and useable backup program that will successfully perform a restore.

[kilou]

I found the problem: for some reasons the Feisty did change the UUID of my root partition so when untarring the system from the archive, the UUID in fstab and menu.lst didn't match the new UUID.

What I did:
- boot on the LiveCD
- format the root partition
- restore the root partition from the tar archive
- open /dev/disk/by-uuid on the LiveCD filesystem and check the UUID for every partitions (these are the new UUID that need to be copied on the restored partition)
- go on the restored root partition, open /etc/fstab and adjust the UUID with the new ones
- on the restored root partition, open /boot/grub/menu.lst and adjust the UUID of the root partition with the new one
- Reboot and your restored system should be useable!


It doesn't appear to be a problem with TAR or the backup process. It really has something to do with Feisty changing the UUID of partitions. Probably this happens when a partition is formated However it is strange because it seems if the whole filesystem is on the same partition (no separate home), there is no problem.........

I'd like to find a way to automatically correct the UUID in fstab and menu.lst after the restore process.....

[jaakan]

Has anyone tried http://freshmeat.net/projects/g4l/ ?

[kilou]

I didn't try it but it doesn't appear to be anything different from Partimage. Those ghost programs are certainly nice but they have 3 drawbacks for me:

- you cannot specify which folder you want to backup and which one you don't want. They just ghost a whole partition
- the tool is not part of the LiveCD, you have to download the package everytime or build a specific boot CD for it. I prefer using the LiveCD but if I don't have access to Internet then I can't restore the system...
- I think that you cannot do live backup with ghost programs (not sure though....)

I really like TAR with a specific script a lot better. I can backup exactly what I want and nothing more to keep the files rather "small" and it is immediately recoverable from the LiveCD since TAR is not a fancy command. There is the possibility to do incremental backup and everything can run in the background on a live system.

I just need to figure out this UUID problem with Feisty but I guess this only happened because I formatted the drive with the install util on the LiveCD. If I run sudo mkfs.ext /dev/hda this should work without changing the UUID.