[sf-lug] Does anyone have a good backup strategy for Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty?)

[Tom Haddon]

On Thu, 2007-09-06 at 11:50 -0700, RBV wrote:
> Hi:
> 
> Three days ago I upgraded from Ubuntu 6 (Dapper) to Feisty.  So far, so
> good, BUT Feisty's use of EXT3 disk broke my old backup strategy based on
> Norton Ghost 2003.  More specifically, a restored Feisty root (not boot)
> partition isn't usable.  Multiple threads on The Ubuntu Forum lead me to
> believe I'm not alone in experiencing this...
> 
> I have at my disposal a Feisty CD-ROM (thanks Jim!), a 180GB USB2 drive
> currently comprising NTSF and FAT32 partions, an internal CD-RW burner, and
> two 80GB tray-mounted drives which I can readily swap in and out of my
> computer.  One such drive currently contains a working W2K / Feisty
> dual-boot system, the second drive contains a W2K / non-working Feisty root
> partition.
> 
> With this in mind, can anyone suggest a sensible, straightforward,
> *reliable* backup strategy for a complete Ubuntu Feisty system?

Rsync is your friend.

I use it to backup my entire system with the exception of some things,
and have restored from it successfully when I did rm
-rf /root_directory_of_a_chroot when I had my /home directory mounted in
the chroot (effectively deleting all home /home).

Something like:

rsync -avz --delete
--exclude-from=host_exclude / /path/of/external/drive

Where the file "host_exclude" looks something like this:

/boot/
/lib/modules
/etc/modules
/etc/lilo.conf
/etc/fstab
/etc/mtab
/proc
/dev
lost+found/
/var/log/
/sys
/media
/tmp

(You don't have to exclude all of these - whatever is appropriate).


Note that this obviously isn't Ubuntu-specific (it works for me fine on
Ubuntu and Debian, and I'm sure any other distro).

Thanks, Tom

> 
> Ideally the process would resemble as much as possible the creation of a
> backup "image" of a working Feisty system that could then be readily
> restored as required.
> 
> Finally, and at the risk of stating the obvious, I'd prefer not to perform
> dangerious experiments until I have a robust backup strategy in place to
> protect me from the consequences of unsuccessful experiments...
> 
> Cheers & thanks,
> Riley
> SFO
> 
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-- 


----------------------------------
Tom Haddon
mailto:tom at greenleaftech.net
m +1.415.871.4180
www.greenleaftech.net