Howto: Backup and restore your system!

[scorpio2002]

Great guide! Just a question: will the backup work on a different hardware?

I mean, usually, when you change motherboard(and so the chipset) the operating system doesn't work anymore(for some reasons not well defined yet). This used to happen with windows, don't know if it happens also with linux.

My final question is: will my backup work if i buy a new moboard?

[frodon]

Yes, mondo is very good, it can create bootable CDs/DVDs of your system very easily. Mondo would be what I suggest for an initial backup of a clean system that is configured the way one wants it. That way if your system gets trashed, boot off the CD/DVD and restore, and you good to go again... but like ghost it will wipe all info. Also its in the repository.

Do you think you can restore with mondo a ghost image on a new drive (if you crash the old one) and have a full operational ubuntu partition ?

[scorpio2002]

Do you think you can restore with mondo a ghost image on a new drive (if you crash the old one) and have a full operational ubuntu partition ?

Not sure, but I think so ^^

[PokerFacePenguin]

Awesome thread. How about someone making it sticky?
Basic system administration with tools already possesed by the user.
Now just fire up your favorite shell and make it an executable script.
Maybe go the extra mile and put it in cron too!

[matthew]

I want to add a thank you to the OP for this howto...you just saved me a LOT of work. As outlined in this thread I had a hard drive failure today, but had done a backup using this method and all was restored perfectly.

You saved me a ton of time a work!! THANK YOU!!! Man, I love Ubuntu.

[salle]

My final question is: will my backup work if i buy a new moboard?

I have no experience above this, but I'd think so. At least if you're using stock Ubuntu kernel which has support compiled in it for most hardware (or you have included support to your own compiled kernel, for the new motherboard and made a backup afterwards) ? This same thing has crossed my mind, I'm going to try and move this Ubuntu installation to another hard drive in a completely different computer. Please, if you succeed in this, I'm interested to know!

[chipmonk010]

First this howto/thread is great really helpful, but i have a couple questions that pertain to my perticular configuration.

i have two LVM xfs partitions /music and /videos they hold data only so i wouldnt want to back them up when making my tar. so if i exclude them in the backup, when i restore my system what will happen? will i get a / dir without these directories?

if i restore from my running system will it remove these folders from my / dir or will it just overwrite the other folders leaving these?

is there some other way i should do this?

thanks to all

[mchatel]

Just a quick note...
I followed the instructions in this HOWTO, to backup my system.

I then deleted my Ubuntu partitions, and went through the full Ubuntu install again, because I wanted to make sure I could recover everything. Once the install was done, and I was logged into Ubuntu once again (but just the base install I had done), I then did the Restore command suggested in the HOWTO, and everything seems to have worked. Of course, the restore command was run as root.

The only thing I seemed to have trouble with, was once I rebooted, bring up Ubuntu with my "restored" system, my volume control was missing from the menu bar, and I couldn't run it. I kept getting an error about making sure to run "gst-register".

So I did. Once that was run, and I rebooted, everything was back to normal.

gst-register has a slightly different name in Ubuntu, but a search for the file should find it. I wasn't exactly sure what gst-register does. Can anyone comment on that. That is the only thing I found that I had to accomodate, outside of the HOWTO instructions.

FYI, I kept my same partitioning scheme I had used before. Not sure how much more work would be required, if someone wanted to separate out more partitions, or use LVM? I wouldn't mind trying LVM, but I have to do some more reading first.

[chipmonk010]

well i think im gonna answer my own question here....

if i exclude my music and videos folders in the back up, reinstall ubuntu from scratch and keeping my partitioning scheme then run the restore it should be fine, it only overrites the folders in my / tree it does not overrite the / folder as a whole so i will still have my /music and video folders. so in theory it should work fine if restoreing without reinstalling ubuntu.

@mchatel
btw LVM is really a nice feature i highly recamend you give it a shot.

[ssck]

I have a noob question :-

If I wanted to restore my current system settings for the software that I have installed and the ubuntu desktop background, etc, after a fresh install of ubuntu, would backing up the home directory be sufficient ?

How do I back up the ~/. directories ?

Appreciate help.

Thanks.