Howto: Backup and restore your system!

[petteriIII]

I have used this method as interesting toy. But it has real use also:

1.Properly constructed back-up file is only ~1 GB. So every machine of network can have it's own personalized backup-file residing in it's own hard-disk and no problems arise from anything; and you can restore 'in place' or remotely.
2.You can harden backup-file against vandals so that they cannot destroy backup-file 'by-accident' even if they somehow succeed to boot with live-CD or USB.
3.You can use this restore-method also when system doesn't boot at all – by booting with live-CD and taking tar-archive from memorystick if needed. At the same moment it is easy to get rid of anything you don't want by first nuking the partition and its associated swap with dd – or even replacing the hard-drive. Because the only method to restore total confidence to a system that has been intruded is 'fresh install'. This method is quick personalized 'fresh install'.

My problem arises from point 3. When you boot to system that has been restored this way you may get some extra boot-lines saying that you cannot write to read-only system. You can use the system normally, but these 'cosmetic failures' may turn out to be nasty in the future, so I am interested to make them disappear. You can make those messages disappear by a change to boot-lines in menu.lst: original line is: kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-11-generic root=UUID=8af0ff78-5ce3-4023-a812-99f76411e5c3 ro . In this line you change ro to rw. Why there is ro in the first place ?

[chris4585]

I would just like to say: THANK YOU! this tutorial works flawlessly. I backed up earlier today, and decided to install a different nvidia driver from the one I have, in short it went horribly wrong and couldn't fix it. I backed up and it worked way better then I thought. This tutorial saved me a bunch of wasted time.

[linnuxnub]

I am running ubuntu 8.10 and I followed the steps outlined in the first post. I used the bz2 compression. Copy the code exactly from the page.

I went to restore from this backup and it all works fine I re-create the excluded directories (media,mnt,sys,proc,etc). Now I reboot to complete the process and I can no longer boot, grub is giving me error 15. What do I do I do not want to have to reinstall my system from scratch please help.

I seem to be having the same problem as sofasurfer on the previous page, the only difference is that I used the code from the tutorial only modifying it to exclude /media.

linnuxnub

I solved it, by skipping the step on recreating directories everything worked as it was supposed to and my system was completely restored to the way it was. Thanks to this tutorial on backups all my data is safe.

[Mayfairy]

I would just like to say: THANK YOU! this tutorial works flawlessly. I backed up earlier today, and decided to install a different nvidia driver from the one I have, in short it went horribly wrong and couldn't fix it. I backed up and it worked way better then I thought. This tutorial saved me a bunch of wasted time.

So it will work that way too. I was just about to make a backup after fiddling with the 8.10 install for two days. Now I got a working system but I want to tweak it a bit more (no restricted drivers without breaking X) so I thought this might be the easiest method to save me some time when the things get really bad.
Then again restoring this backup doesn't move the extra drivers and files I have installed afterwards, just the config files that use them. .

In this case I'd need to keep track of installed files so that I don't have any extras laying around everywhere.

(ie. I have a working system with nvidia-glx-177 drivers, I make a backup, fiddle around and install nvidia-glx-180 drivers which in the end won't work and restore the backup so I end up using 177's once more. The 180 files are still around since they're not named the same as 177.)


EDIT: "--exclude=/home" is also a good thing to have, especially if it's on different partition. That is unless you use different partition to store media files and stuff. For me the root dir contains 6 gigs of stuff while /home dir is 90 gigs.

[ricky15100]

hi guys, i have a bit of a problem, i re-installed a fresh copy of ubuntu and then did a restore with the method above.

Now i when it boots i get "error 15 file not found", i have tried re-installing grub which it tells me is successfull but when i re-boot i get the same error.

Help

Thanks Leon

[Jammanuser]

hi guys, i have a bit of a problem, i re-installed a fresh copy of ubuntu and then did a restore with the method above.

Now i when it boots i get "error 15 file not found", i have tried re-installing grub which it tells me is successfull but when i re-boot i get the same error.

Help

Thanks Leon

Check your /boot/grub/menu.lst and verify that your Ubuntu entries are pointed at the correct partition. You can run "sudo fdisk -l" (the last letter is a lowercase "L") in the Terminal to find out the sdxy syntax location, and then use it in your menu.lst in the "root (hdx,y)" lines, where the "x" and the "y" stand for drive and partition number respectively. FYI, the "(hdx,y)" notation starts the count for both drives and partitions at 0, while the "sdxy" one, on the other hand, uses letters to indicate the disk, and starts the count for partitions starting at 1. So "sda1" (the first hard drive, first partition) would be the same thing as "(hd0,0)" using the other syntax.

Hope it helps.

-Jam man

[ricky15100]

Check your /boot/grub/menu.lst and verify that your Ubuntu entries are pointed at the correct partition. You can run "sudo fdisk -l" (the last letter is a lowercase "L") in the Terminal to find out the sdxy syntax location, and then use it in your menu.lst in the "root (hdx,y)" lines, where the "x" and the "y" stand for drive and partition number respectively. FYI, the "(hdx,y)" notation starts the count for both drives and partitions at 0, while the "sdxy" one, on the other hand, uses letters to indicate the disk, and starts the count for partitions starting at 1. So "sda1" (the first hard drive, first partition) would be the same thing as "(hd0,0)" using the other syntax.

Hope it helps.

-Jam man

Thanks for the help Jam man, it was the uuid, i had to go into dev/devices to find the uuid and replaced it in the menu.lst, so it appears that when you do a fresh install you need to change the uuid, so i did a new back up and also excluded the boot directory this time when i did the restore it worked fine.

Thanks anyway Jamman much appreciated i am a happy cat now

[warpasylum]

Hey,
Thanks guys, this'll definitely help me out alot in the coming weeks. I finally gave up the ghost as far as Windows on my laptop n' want to experiment with my Ubuntu to get better at it. This'll really help me out if I hopelessly crash my system. Thanks again guys.

[crispeto]

So I made a mistake and now have a 2.7 gig "Backup.tgz" icon. How do I delete it?

[YoungQuiz]

this was helpful!