Howto: Backup and restore your system!

[ambdeep]

I was wondering if i could install a newer version of ubuntu and still use the restore without causing any problems....also can i install, say, kubuntu and still use the restore generated on ubuntu......some people were also complaining about a grub error 15......could you also guide me through the walk-around of this error as i could not understand the posts which were ment to explain it.......any help will be appreciated......
Thanks in advance!

[Lunx]

As someone with only basic knowledge of things computery, I've also found this thread very helpful and easy to follow. This morning I installed an app that is really cool for making back-ups of your system, or even creating your own distros, Remastersys. Very simple to download and install (once you set up the repository), and simple to use and easy to understand GUI. Took me half an hour max to set up repository, download, install and then create a full backup. I've got a Jaunty install and all the extra apps I like to install first up, the ISO ended up around 1.1GB. Haven't burnt it yet to see if it worked successfully, as I haven't any spare DVDs to hand. There's apparently also a way of running it in a virtual machine, but I have zero experience with VMware yet, so that's the thing I'm just about to go and play with.

Remastersys for Ubuntu

And an easy to follow tutorial on usage

[weatherguyto]

Dear Heliode/and forum members,


After you completely backup your system given by Heliode the question is how do you reload the tar file? I happen to tried it but didn't work because I couldn't delete the excludes(proc, lost+found, sys etc)they were lock by the system before I had to rebooted the system.

Could tell me what do I need to do to load the backup Tar file
if by system happen to go bad at one point?

Could provide me steps I need to take.

I think I need to format my ext2 then load the backup tar file,
and add the missing folders (proc, sys, lost+found).But how do you load the backup tar file in this state? When there is no OS install yet, maybe boot into live CD, and then what do I do. I'm a novice to Linux please advise.

The problem is that my system will not shutdown out of X windows(gnome) after I installed the video drivers(nvidia 177)

SO I'm getting a lots of check disk(fsck) restarting up after a shutdown.

Thanks for you help,
William

[crazypeppo]

@the original poster

Do you mind if I give a copy of this to everyone I know?

[KEE]

hey there nice guide and job at explaining everything =)

my situation is I have linux~intrepid 8.10 and windows xp pro on the same drive. I am wondering if this would work for me? windows had the "missing system32/hal.dll" thingy on startup. this stoped the whole drive from booting but I was able to rewrite the boot.ini in windows using ubuntu cdrom. but windows still has that thing on start up and intrepid works just fine and i still have the grub too to select the os's. I am thinking of reinstalling because i dont mind reinstalling winxp. nothing to loss there, but on intrepid! ya really weary on reinstalling linux, its all prettied up and dont want to have to do the customisation all over again. I love that you guide can help me but i need to know if it would work. if you have a guide available for my situation id like if you add your comment in my post, instead of here since it will be easier and less traffic with other post if i come across any complications and I will never lose the thread in ubuntu's enormous thread farm. Please and thank you for your help

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...22#post7054922

[Ericyzfr1]

That whole stuff about Grub not working and all is ********, I used Norton Ghost 2003 to back-up and restore Ubuntu with Grub and all works fine including the booting part.

Ghost and Acronis both restore Grub without any problems and work perfectly with Ext3. However, it is no longer true and can only do a cluster to cluster back-up which can take hours and take a lot of HD space. I did some searching and contacted Acronis support team and they are unwilling to say if and when they will support Ext4.

[telekinetic]

Thanks, this was extremely helpful!

One suggestion though. Instead of excluding an entire directory, why not just exclude the contents? No reason to create sys, mnt, and the rest to restore. You can leave the directory, just exclude the contents by using a wildcard *

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

Be sure to wrap the directory to be excluded in "quotes".

[sadicote]

Thank you, Heliode, great guide, but i came across Remastersys only a few days ago, and i just cannot help singing it's praises and raving about it at every opportunity i get. There is also the Back in Time utility that i read about. Stuff like this will forever change the way people use Linux.

[markitoxs]

Really good guide.

[dc0m]

I used the following method successfully for long time now. Make sure you umount everything besides / partition and /newdisk/proc is empty.

cp -ax /  /backupdisk

That will copy everything on the / partition to backupdisk.

When you want to restore just do the same thing again.

cp -ax / /olddisk

Where / is in this case the root of the backup system and /olddisk is target.

Good Luck.

You can also boot in the backup system just edit grub and fstab to reflect that partition.