Howto: Backup and restore your system!

[PaulWhipp]

As space is so cheap these days, I 'backup' my entire workspace locally using rsync (use 'man rsync' for more details). Its worth checking out - even if you have the backup file system mounted locally, rsync's options give you great control over synchronising the backup directory and its really fast compared to tar or cp based solutions. This has the added benefit that you can mount your backup on another system and carry on working then use rsync to put the work back on your main system later.

My serious project work is further protected by the use of online repositories (subversion) which have the benefit of version tracking and deployment capabilities (I favour launchpad for open source and springloops for commercial work).

[zero7404]

i have a single hdd but with 2 partitions one mounted on / and the other on /home

since thumb drives are convenient and cheap, you can backup to one....

or if you have a portable hard drive, you can backup to that...

in this way, your backups are on separate media, no risk of loss if your drive crashes...

[leus]

since thumb drives are convenient and cheap, you can backup to one....

or if you have a portable hard drive, you can backup to that...

in this way, your backups are on separate media, no risk of loss if your drive crashes...

i have a single hdd but with 2 partitions one mounted on / and the other on /home

Me too i have /home in separate partition ,but I have a second drive formatted with ntfs I think is wrong , ext3 is better for backup my /home?

[PaulWhipp]

It depends how you backup. If you tar or process stuff into a single file you should be OK using an NTFS drive. However if you rsync or cp directly you will find everything comes back with all the permissions enabled which is very irritating.

If in doubt use ext3... and your backup should definitely be removable (and actually removed) if you want to survive fire, flood, lightning strikes etc.

[zero7404]

on my machine, i have 2 320GB disks, they are set up as follows:

disk sda:
sda1 (ntfs) 150GB -- vista installation
sda2 (extended) 148GB -- ubuntu installation
sda5 (ext3) 147GB
sda6 (swap) 1GB

disk sdb:
sdb1 (ntfs) 273GB -- personal data storage and acronis backups
sdb2 (ext3) 25GB -- clonezilla backups

external freeagent go:
225 GB (ntfs) -- used for robocopy (vista) and backup of contents of sdb1

i use the ext3 format wherever it is needed with respect to linux files/backups. otherwise ntfs does fine since ubuntu can read/write and mount/automount to it without a problem...

[haneya]

Hi , I know my question is out of subject a little but I need some help ,

I backed up my ubuntu system with home directory , I need now to restore only home directory from the archive I tried with file-roler but it take to much time , I hope some one tell me how to extract only HOME from this archive.

Thanks

[antonya]

Hello,

I hope this is the right forum as I am completely new to Ubuntu and the Linux functionality and of course these forums. I have left the Windows ranks after much pressure from experienced Linux friends and I must say I like what I see so far.

My issue is with transferring my Firefox bookmarks etc. that I saved in my Windows Vista configuration using Mozbackup. I now have a Mozbackup archive that I'd like to integrate into my new Ubuntu installation, but I see that Mozbackup isn't compatible with Ubuntu.

Could anyone please tell me how I can transfer my original Mozbackup backup into my new Ubuntu installation?

Many thanks in advance,
Antony

[Wookiee]

Should I be worried that the original partition is 295 GB, but the tar image is barely 25 GB?

I've had bad experiences with that factor of compression.

[Nyken]

OF all the tips that I've read since migrating to Linux and Ubuntu a couple of weeks ago, th is one has saved my ****. As I learn how to set things up and get them working, I back up my system with this guy's simple idea. Guess I did something wrong, since my File System desktop icon isn't working for one thing, so untaring the backup fixed things nicely.

Just wanna drop a thanks a million.

[dmizer]

Should I be worried that the original partition is 295 GB, but the tar image is barely 25 GB?

I've had bad experiences with that factor of compression.

The backup tutorial doesn't do a flat image of the whole drive, it only backs up data. So, you should compare that 25 GB file to the size of the actual data on the drive.