How to back up a system?

Question

If I want to make a backup of my entire OS (including but not just my home directory), how do I go about this?

Is it as simple as backing up everything in / and then when if I suffer a crash, just copying the files back over?
Will this cover grub, and how do I actually do this when the system is inoperable?

Answer 1

FILES

Refer to this howto: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=35087

In simple terms, the backup command is: sudo tar czf /backup.tar.gz --exclude=/backup.tar.gz --exclude=/home --exclude=/media --exclude=/dev --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/proc --exclude=/tmp /. Add more --exclude= parameters if you need to.

It will create an archive of all your files at /backup.tar.gz, which you can then copy over to another computer/drive and restore your files if the install goes pear-shaped. You can do it from a LiveCD, by mounting the "bad" system under /media or /mnt and running tar xf /path/to/drive/with/backup.tar.gz -C /mnt (substitute for the actual path to the "bad" system).

GRUB

This will not cover GRUB, however you can easily reinstall it by following this guide here. You only need to do steps Three and Four.

Answer 2

You can use Remastersys to create a bootable live CD/DVD image. This will install like a normal Ubuntu CD.

To install Remastersys, you first need to add a repository:

deb http://www.geekconnection.org/remastersys/repository karmic/

You can then install it from the Software Centre as usual.

Once installed, use it to make a 'dist' backup. This means that user data will be excluded from the ISO image.

This is often used to create custom distributions but is still useful for the backup task you have in mind. One caveat is that it may fail if the contents of / (minus user data in /home) takes up too much memory because the ISO file format can only hold ~4GB data. Remastersys uses a file system called squashfs to compress your data so you should be OK with up to ~8GB.

Answer 3

Here is a good tutorial using PartImage.

Answer 4

Noone noticed clonezilla. It makes a complete image of your hard drive, so it backups absolutely everything. It's as easy as burning an iso or creating a bootable flash drive.

The actual backup takes a while, but is the most reliable.

Answer 5

I use a program called Back In Time that's similar to Apple's Time Machine.

It's easy to tell it where you want your backups to go and how often to do the backup.

Back In Time is in the Ubuntu repos.