Howto: Backup and restore your system!

[tech9]

There's a very basic strategy here. A fuller discussion and an ingenious technique to create rotating "snapshots" using rsync and hard links is here. (This is basically what I do for my backups.)

I've never tried "dirvish", but it is rsync-based, and is in the repositories. It is mentioned in this thread.

nice snippet, I will have to try this.

[LunarWolf]

Are there any good alternatives that will enable me to back up directly to a CD or DVD. Right now I am trying many new things and admitedly I screwed up a few times resulting in reinstalling Ubuntu. I just want a way to keep a standard ubuntu status as a control I can resort back to without having to reinstall it and go through a lengthy update process or take up room on an already small 20gb hard drive.

As it stands everything is pretty much at factory settings as possible, having only installed the updates at this point and configured Evolution mail to accept my gmail account as the only alteration.

[wildx005]

Just to confirm - the procedure given in the first post in this thread absolutely works (or else I would not be able to type this here). My upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy failed because of 'dependencies' and eventually the little upgrade window just went away leaving me with a very very not working system.

Because I have previously followed the instructions given in the 'First Post' - I was able to get everything back exactly how it was before:

Which, as an XP User with (practically) no Linux knowledge, seems pretty amazing,

Thanks

David

[tuproxy]

What happens if the backup command is run again and the original backup.tar file hasn't been moved or renamed. Will the command over-write the first file?

[hotrod6657]

Okay, this might be an odd question and if it's already been addressed i'm sorry but how would i go about deleting the file that's created, the backup.tgz file?

I'm really new to everything so if the answer is more obvious than expected please be nice. When i try and just delete it i'm told i don't have the proper permissions, even though i am the administrator.

Any suggestions?

[hotrod6657]

nevermind, i did a little poking and found my answer. Much simpler than i was expecting.

it was as easy as

sudo su
rm /backup.tgz

in terminal.

[milkyspit]

Guys, please excuse me if this is covered ground as this has become a VERY long thread... I tried to skim through it, but in the end am hoping someone could assist!

Preface: I'm a longtime software developer and somewhat familiar with Linux admin, at least on a small scale... thing is, most of my experience has been on CentOS and OS X, plus I've been out of that career path for well over a year, so no doubt I'm rusty, too!

The situation: our home network has used an OS X box as its fileserver for several years, but recently I migrated everything to a dual core box running the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 7.10. The server consists of a single partition on a terabyte drive (yes, I know not optimal but serves our needs for now, and I figure I can enable quotas in the near future if need be)... on the partition is the OS itself, plus a share exposed via Samba as 'Public' which all other machines on the network use to store and retrieve virtually all their data. I've got a pair of 250GB notebook hard drives in external enclosures and the general strategy is to run a full backup of the Public share once per week, alternating drives each week. For now the share stores less than 250GB so backup drive capacity isn't an issue. One drive (the more recent backup) resides in an airtight Otter Box in our detached garage, serving as the 'offsite' storage... the other drive (the less recent backup) is in another part of the house so the drive will be at room temperature when it's time to run the next backup onto it. I've followed this sort of scheme with our OS X server (a Mac G4 cube if it matters) for at least two years with good results.

Thing is, the backups are SLOW... ideally I'd like to speed the process without compromising integrity. Also, I'd like to use another external drive to store an image of the OS itself so I can do a bare metal recovery if needed. Let me emphasize that if the fileserver fails and we have no viable backup, we've lost pretty much everything... at the same time, if the backup process is too cumbersome I doubt I'll be vigilant about maintaining it, which also puts us in extreme jeopardy. It's got to be a robust procedure, and it's got to be easy.

Under my root account on the Ubuntu server I've got a backup alias that I kickoff via SSH overnight to run each backup...

alias bakpub='find /home/samba/shares/Public -xdev -depth -print | cpio -pdv /media/bak/.'

This may or may not be a good way to go about things... I have my suspicions that it's not the best way.

Could someone with far better grounding than I've got (there must be several of you out there) give me a critique and more importantly, suggest a better way to accomplish my goals? Script, some sort of open source software that might meet my needs, anything to improve the process. Please remember that my goals are maintenance of a valid image of the Public share; a sufficient image for rebuilding the fileserver itself; and a simple, reliable procedure.

Again, apologies if I'm covering the obvious! Please give this Ubuntu noob some guidance, and accept my sincere thanks!!

[linux4909]

i just tried this method and got this error message:

gzip: stdout: No space left on device

it was in the middle of backing up.

my guess is, this may be cause because the size of my home/root isn't big enough to hold the backup and what i'm backing up in one?

i ran the df command. here's the output:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 9614148 9596616 0 100% /
varrun 512988 84 512904 1% /var/run
varlock 512988 0 512988 0% /var/lock
procbususb 512988 84 512904 1% /proc/bus/usb
udev 512988 84 512904 1% /dev
devshm 512988 0 512988 0% /dev/shm
lrm 512988 34696 478292 7% /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-generic/volatile
/dev/sda4 131751808 17707912 107351220 15% /home
/dev/sda1 10667128 6044348 4622780 57% /media/sda1

[frodemt]

I want to include the folders you exluded, but not files in these folders. Can I do that like this:

tar cvpjf backup.tar.bz2 --exclude=/proc/* --exclude=/lost+found/* --exclude=/backup.tar.bz2 --exclude=/mnt/* --exclude=/sys/* /

[garret]

http://restore-backup.com might be worth a look too.