WARNING - Probably best randomers don't come along and repeat this... there's no need to wipe your system if its working, especially not if the backup fails afterwards. -PriceChild
My exact testing steps:
1. Freshly Installed 7.10 (Gusty-Gibbon-i386-desktop) on a Laptop.
2. Copied test data to system (600MB / 1,400 files) to both my home dir and desktop. And then installed KTron application (just a small-game to test if it works later).
3. Opened the Terminal and ran the following:4. I then inserted a USB flash-drive & backed up the 'backup.tgz' and removed the drive.Code:cd / sudo tar cvpzf backup.tgz --exclude=/etc/fstab --exclude=/boot --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/backup.tgz --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys /
5. As part of the test I intended to serverly damage the filesystem, so again, still at root on the terminal I ran the following to destroy the system (WARNING: Dont do this if you value the system or it's data):6. Manually powered-off the system.Code:sudo rm -fr *
7. Powered on system and booted with the ubuntu-7.10 disc, and performed a new, fresh installation.
8. Once booted into my new installation I then inserted my USB flash-drive and proceeded to extract/restore my system/files back onto the system drive:
9. Restarted the system and all was restored fine. System & files restored and working.Code:sudo tar xvpfz /media/USB-DRIVE/backup.tgz -C /
Last edited by Nightwalker07; November 2nd, 2007 at 12:09 AM.
for u my brooooo
now it actually work....
my fault on the last tried ist that i wasn't umount /media/sdax....
after i umount it...there's no problem at all....
offcourse theres trouble after kernel upgrade...but this thing make me back healthy again..
this thing is the simplest thing to back up....
ok. I have separate root and /home partitions I made the backup.tgz but I made it in /home. si instead of
I ranCode:sudo tar cvpzf backup.tgz --exclude=/etc/fstab --exclude=/boot --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/backup.tgz --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys /but the problem is that the file generated is bigger that the / partition.Code:sudo tar cvpzf /home/backup.tgz --exclude=/etc/fstab --exclude=/boot --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/home/backup.tgz --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys /
so do I extract home and save it as another file. then add it after I restore the backup? how do the separate partitions work when backing up? I'm pretty new to backing up and restoring stuff...
nevermind. it worked I just extracted from home to root and it worked fine!
Thank you for the tutorial! You saved my ***. My gutsy upgrade failed in the middle of installing and I backed up with your method right before I started that step.
Glad you got it sorted and the backup worked for you!
Why do you --exclude=/etc/fstab ?
Is fstab generated automatically, I didn't think so.. ?
To some extent you were lucky. If you had installed gcc instead of KTron in your test, then you would have found that the "--exclude /sys" option in the backup script leads to the exclusion of such things as /usr/included/sys and everything else with "/sys" somewhere in the path. After your restore, gcc would have been broken because of missing header files. I posted earlier about this.
You need to add the --anchored option to tar to avoid this behavior.
(But even then, I've been bitten so many times by the unexpected behavior of tar's various options, that I've stopped using it for my backups.)
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