Backup and restore in Ubuntu
1: Backing-up
"What should I use to backup my system then?" might you ask. Easy; the same thing you use to backup/compress everything else; TAR. Unlike Windows, Linux doesn't restrict root access to anything, so you can just throw every single file on a partition in a TAR file!
To do this, become root with
and go to the root of your filesystem (we use this in our example, but you can go anywhere you want your backup to end up, including remote or removable drives.)
Now, below is the full command I would use to make a backup of my system:
2: Restoring
Warning: Please, for goodness sake, be careful here. If you don't understand what you are doing here you might end up overwriting stuff that is important to you, so please take care!
Well, we'll just continue with our example from the previous chapter; the file backup.tgz in the root of the partition.
Once again, make sure you are root and that you and the backup file are in the root of the filesystem.
One of the beautiful things of Linux is that This'll work even on a running system; no need to screw around with boot-cd's or anything. Of course, if you've rendered your system unbootable you might have no choice but to use a live-cd, but the results are the same. You can even remove every single file of a Linux system while it is running with one command. I'm not giving you that command though!
Well, back on-topic.
This is the command that I would use:
Or if you used bz2;
WARNING: this will overwrite every single file on your partition with the one in the archive!
Just hit enter/return/your brother/whatever and watch the fireworks. Again, this might take a while. When it is done, you have a fully restored Ubuntu system! Just make sure that, before you do anything else, you re-create the directories you excluded:
And when you reboot, everything should be the way it was when you made the backup!
2.1: GRUB restore
Now, if you want to move your system to a new harddisk or if you did something nasty to your GRUB (like, say, install Windows), You'll also need to reinstall GRUB.
There are several very good howto's on how to do that here on this forum, so i'm not going to reinvent the wheel. Instead, take a look here:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthre...t=grub+restore
There are a couple of methods proposed. I personally recommend the second one, posted by remmelt, since that has always worked for me.
"What should I use to backup my system then?" might you ask. Easy; the same thing you use to backup/compress everything else; TAR. Unlike Windows, Linux doesn't restrict root access to anything, so you can just throw every single file on a partition in a TAR file!
To do this, become root with
Code:
sudo su
Code:
cd /
Code:
tar cvpzf backup.tgz --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/backup.tgz --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys /
2: Restoring
Warning: Please, for goodness sake, be careful here. If you don't understand what you are doing here you might end up overwriting stuff that is important to you, so please take care!
Well, we'll just continue with our example from the previous chapter; the file backup.tgz in the root of the partition.
Once again, make sure you are root and that you and the backup file are in the root of the filesystem.
One of the beautiful things of Linux is that This'll work even on a running system; no need to screw around with boot-cd's or anything. Of course, if you've rendered your system unbootable you might have no choice but to use a live-cd, but the results are the same. You can even remove every single file of a Linux system while it is running with one command. I'm not giving you that command though!
Well, back on-topic.
This is the command that I would use:
Code:
tar xvpfz backup.tgz -C /
Code:
tar xvpfj backup.tar.bz2 -C /
Just hit enter/return/your brother/whatever and watch the fireworks. Again, this might take a while. When it is done, you have a fully restored Ubuntu system! Just make sure that, before you do anything else, you re-create the directories you excluded:
Code:
mkdir proc
mkdir lost+found
mkdir mnt
mkdir sys
etc...
2.1: GRUB restore
Now, if you want to move your system to a new harddisk or if you did something nasty to your GRUB (like, say, install Windows), You'll also need to reinstall GRUB.
There are several very good howto's on how to do that here on this forum, so i'm not going to reinvent the wheel. Instead, take a look here:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthre...t=grub+restore
There are a couple of methods proposed. I personally recommend the second one, posted by remmelt, since that has always worked for me.
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