Howto: Backup and restore your system!

[Paul86fxr]

I tried all you had talked about and had the following error when moving the TGZ file from my disk to the root directory. any ideas?

[AlexanderDGreat]

This completely worked for me I backup & restored my Mozilla Thunderbird Profile from my laptop to my PC at home. Here's what I did from the tutorial.

1. Go to my laptop
2. Open terminal
3. sudo su
4. cd /home/me/.mozilla-thunderbird/
5. tar cvzpf mozthun.tgz --exclude=./mozthun.tgz *
Wait to backup
6. cp mozthun.tgz /media/myusbdisk/

Restoring
1. Go to my Home PC
2. Open up terminal
3. sudo su
4. cd /media/myusbdisk/
5. cp mozthun.tgz /home/me/.mozilla-thunderbird/
6. cd /home/me/.mozilla-thunderbird
7. tar xzvpf mozthun.tgz -C .
Wait

Opened up Mozilla Thunderbird and all my message, settings, passwords, ARE THERE, unbelievable!

[rikilshah]

This is awesome.But I have a problem...My File System drive is having very little space say around 3 GB not enough for backup.So What I want is to create tar in another drive.Is it possible?It would be great if you can show command.


PS:I am a little child in the world of Ubuntu.

[newb85]

If you're trying to create the backup on another hard drive, hard drive partition, or large flash drive, you must first mount the drive. Then, in the command line, instead of just giving the name of the backup file you're creating, give the path/filename, where the path includes the mount point.

For example, usually if you plug in a thumb drive or external HD, Ubuntu automatically mounts it on the Desktop. Then, your path/filename would be something like ~/Desktop/8.0\ GB\ Flashdrive/Somefolder/backup.tbz

Of course, if the folder you're backing up includes the mount point, you need to exclude the mounted drive, or at least exclude the backup file.

I don't think it's possible/practical to try to write the file to a CD/DVD as it's created.

[rikilshah]

Thanks buddy.For that first I'll have to learn Tar commands.I'll try it out and will put up result soon.

[rikilshah]

After an usual Googling I found few good utilities which replaces command line with easy to use GUIs and plus extra features.

1>SBackup-Few Clicks and you are all set to backup!!Amazing thing is that you can schedule Backup hourly,daily,Monthly....and can restore any time you need..

2>APTonCD-All your installed packages would be on single iso file.So whenever you install your system no need to download them all again.It is very useful for people with slow internet(like me stuck@20KBPS).


This is very easy to use and very helpful.....

[matthew.ball]

In a similar vein, I wrote a bash script which saves a copy of the fstab, the sources.list and exports a file containing the currently installed packages.

I also have a complementary script which does the opposite and restores the files, and imports the package list.

It sort of relies on having a separate /home partition. It was just for me as I have broken my system a few too many times and remembering the names of installed packages was becoming tedious, I found some stuff about backup/restore online, and I saw the opportunity to automate the process (and learn some bash!), someone on irc asked about the script and I figured it could come in handy.

It's only about 12 lines per file, pretty easy to replicate but I'll happily give it to anyone who is interested.

Edit: I was going to have it copy the contents of /var/cache/apt/archives and tar it up, and could it easily add it. I just figure most people clear it out anyway so they'd rarely have anything to save.

I don't have an upload for it, sorry. If you're interested send me an email (details should be in my profile), and I'll forward the files (and a README) on.

[AlexanderDGreat]

Hi, can I download your script? I want that.

[imousavi]

I want 2 restore from a directory with this address : /media/New Volume

how should I edit this code
tar xvpfz backup.tgz -C /

[BarryM]

Hello there, I hope someone out there can help me with this. I want to make a backup of my entire Ubuntu drive to an external (USB Drive). As far as I can gather, the method suggested by Heliode at the very start of this thread puts the backup on the desktop. Am I right there?

I have got my external drive connected and mounted (it is a FreeAgent drive, and appears as "FreeAgent Drive" in the directory tree). I have managed to navigate to it via the Media directory (I found out that I needed to put the name in quotes for Ubuntu to recognise it in the root terminal).

If I now want to make my backup, having got to the directory in the FreeAgent drive that I want to store the backup in, will it work with the "tar cvpzf backup.tgz --exclude=/... (exclude list) /"? How do I stop the contents of the FreeAgent drive being included in the tarball? Should I add --exclude="/media/FreeAgent Drive" in the exclude list?

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks