Howto: Backup and restore your system!

[happyhacker]

I have BackupPC installed which offers a tar method. Would I achieve the same system if I used this program? Is anyone using it for complete system backups?

[mozkill]

While I think its nifty to do backups using the hardcore method, its SOOOO much easier just to use Clonezilla . Clonezilla uses the standard Gzip backup method except that it has a really nice wizard UI to go with it and the tool is bootable, and is able to backup to thumbdrive, bootable image, or a samba/windows share folder.

http://clonezilla.org/

[happyhacker]

Yes, sure but I am not using the GUI just access from a networked laptop running Webmin. I will look at Clonezilla. Sounds like it may come from the same stable as Filezilla?

[johnaaronrose]

The disk used on my laptop is approximately 40GB. I want to back it up to a usb 1TB drive, formatted as FAT32. As I understand it, the max file size on a FAT32 device is 4GB. When I try the original heliode method of creating a gzip file, it stops with a message about 4GB file too large. I don't see any option in gzip to split large resultant gzip files. The best option seems to me to be to use Partimage, which allows resultant split files. Any recommendations?

[Nyken]

Hell of a lot better than messing with aptoncd even. I like being sure about what I'm backing up. Thanks !

[renkinjutsu]

i recently had to restore my computer using this tar method, but i've been having some problems.

after restoring, i can no longer mount usb drives or mount ANYTHING for that matter.. i have no connectivity (the connectivity icon doesn't even show up) and my sound doesn't work (the volume applet also tells me it's busted)

another thing is that i backed up all my media files in another tar archive (i didn't want to waste the time and cpu power to try to compress media files) so i left them in a .tar file .. however, when i try to restore those files, only the directories and some files are restored.. the tar is a 107GB file (according to 'du' and also the properties tab in nautilus) after extracting that archive into my /home directory, the total disk usage is still just 6GB .. how can i restore the rest of my files?

[zero7404]

why not just use clonezilla ? it's got different compressions to choose from, and from what i remember, my 7GB installation got compressed to about 2GB....

backup and restore process was really fast and simple, and you can get your system back up and running in less than 1 hr (10 mins for me), as opposed to reinstalling everything then restoring with the process the op mentions.....

[renkinjutsu]

it's too late for me to use clonezilla .. it seems i've lost a massive amount of data already (unless i can restore from that tar file)

can't use clonezilla anyway, i'm using the ext4 filesystem which is still being tested by clonezilla

[zero7404]

do you have a single hdd or 2 hdd's in your system ?

[renkinjutsu]

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