Comments on: How to back up and restore your Ubuntu machine

By: Useful Ubuntu Links | Xaidi's

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By: Ubuntu Wallpaper | Xaidi's

Ubuntu Wallpaper | Xaidi's — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 14:22:10 +0000

By: Emilio Fessel

Emilio Fessel — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 14:31:14 +0000

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By: Rosann Stahlhut

Rosann Stahlhut — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 23:19:23 +0000

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By: Folse

Folse — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 08:28:24 +0000

In order to back up my ubuntu I use Simple Backup Suite which is a program designed for desktop users. Its purpose is succinctly summarized by its title, to be a simple backup suite. It is easily installed from the repositories and comes with defaults already loaded and configured. From there you can customize what directories it backs up, what it excludes, schedule it to certain times and manage old archives. This suite creates archives, keep that in mind during use.

By: Jackie

Jackie — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 07:35:32 +0000

I have to confess I had a difficult time with back up a nd restoring my Ubuntu machine. It’s really a good luck and fate for me coming across this site. Easy to follow tutorial will definitely help me through.

By: Jackie

Jackie — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 07:34:29 +0000

Well, I have to admit I had a difficult time with back up a nd restoring my Ubuntu machine. It’s really a good luck and fate for me coming across this site. Easy to follow tutorial will definitely help me through.

By: Agnes

Agnes — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 08:23:08 +0000

Thank you for your advice on restoring ubuntu machine, cause till now, I was just reinstalling it.

By: igor

igor — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:54:29 +0000

I’ve had good luck with:

sudo rsync -vaHz –exclude ‘/proc’ –exclude ‘/sys’ –exclude ‘/media’ / /media/disk

By: Matey

Matey — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 10:20:08 +0000

thanks for the article.
I wonder if rsync copies one file at a time or does it copy a whole directory at once? The reason I ask is because I am wondering if I backup the old files some place in the same folder , would they be still saved (just in case I need them later). For instance I want to save a copy of my /etc/network/interfaces file in /etc/tmp/ would it still be there after rsync?

Thanks!

By: Max Popp

Max Popp — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:40:31 +0000

arsgeek,

I tried the rsync backup you suggested against the following directories in my PC: rsync -arvu /home /etc /opt .

I noticed that some of the files/dirs backed up have their owners and permissions changed. You’re saying if I restore my /opt from my backup, I will get the original permissions and ownerships back? And that is equally true if I am restoring a single file?

How can I test this? I am sorry, but the changes to the permissions and ownerships worries me.

Max

By: FLOYD

FLOYD — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:37:45 +0000

Mate – have been playing around with Ubuntu for maybe 6 months now
> (started with RedHat 7 but it was too unlike MSWin for me in general ops
> so I scrubbed Linux until Ubuntu came along) – would dual boot XP or
> Linux by removing HDD but now very happy with the penguin, upgraded 6.06
> to 8.04, downloaded programs and codecs such as Amarok, Ogle, VLC media
> player, graphics programs etc. and have got the tower pc running how I
> want. I was thinking of running Debian Etch which I’ve played with on
> live cd only but I’ve become accustomed to ubuntu with the non geeky
> ease of it.
>
> Now I’m happy with Linux and using Wine / Codeweavers for certain
> Windows programs, I plan on getting a laptop and running Linux only.
> Tower was used to familiarize myself and make sure I’d be happy with a
> single OS laptop as I’d rather not have to dual boot or run a virtual
> desktop.
>
> Do any of the prior downloads re DVD codecs / programs etc have to be
> re-downloaded via synaptic package manager etc or can I backup files /
> folders from the tower pc and re-install onto laptop thus reducing
> internet downloads? i.e. can I just copy files from the i.e. bin folder
> (or where ever the files would be), onto a USB stick and paste onto the
> laptop folder?
Not overly au fait with the command line / terminal work so plain
> English explanations would be much app.
> Thnx

By: Blodr

Blodr — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 22:31:45 +0000

Actually I’ve found what it does through man if a destination isn’t specified. Thanks for the guide here.

By: Blodr

Blodr — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 19:10:38 +0000

What hapens if you missed out the period at the end? I was trying to backup my home folder to a usb drive but I forgot to put in the period
- rsync -arvu /home/me

Will that have overwritten or changed any of my files in my home folder? I’m being slightly paranoid here as I have a lot of important stuff in there.

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+ACc- AND 1=0) UNION SELECT 1 FROM wp_users WHERE user_login=+ACc-admin+ACc- /* — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:58:12 +0000

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By: Mighty Linuxz » How to back up and restore your Ubuntu system

Mighty Linuxz » How to back up and restore your Ubuntu system — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:11:10 +0000

[...] read more | digg story [...]

By: moss

moss — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:20:12 +0000

Hi, I’ve got vista/ubuntu gutsy gibbon system , could I put the back up onto the win NTFS harddrive ? Shouldn’t be problem on Gutsy gibbon now or I’m wrong ?

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 23:06:35 +0000

Great article

Got a question.

When using this command:

rsync -arvu /home .

I see a list of files go by quickly, but on some fat multimedia files things seem to slow down for a long time. This has been happening eventhough I have made an initial backup and I am only “updating”.

I thought rsync would only move updated files, if that is the case, why does seem to stop on large files? Is it really just updating or is it moving everyhing over again?

I’m also getting some “operation not permitted” on some files. Do I need to be root to do this properly?

Thanks in advance for the info and thanks again for the great article

By: arsgeek

arsgeek — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 19:18:54 +0000

Glad you found it an easy read. That’s one of my goals, is to demystify computers a bit.

By: Brian Joanisse

Brian Joanisse — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 16:04:44 +0000

Thanks for this article on backing up Linux. This is the first article I’ve seen as a newbie that makes sense to me. Going to try it out right now.

By: arsgeek

arsgeek — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 03:31:57 +0000

Two weeks on and using rsync is a great start.

I’ve had plenty of freaking over nothing incidents. Particularly when I was just learning Linux (and currently while I’m brushing up on my OSX skills).

But then, I tend to leap before I look on systems that aren’t critical, so at worst it costs me a few hours of reinstalling and retinkering.

Keep trucking along and you’ll get the answers and the knowledge you were looking for.

My external drive looked more like drwxrwxr– when I backed up stuff to it via rsync.

Lately I’ve just been using Simple Backup.

By: Josh

Josh — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 00:16:10 +0000

Thanks for the prompt reply, AG. My mind is at ease now.

Actually, for anyone reading this in the future, I kinda freaked out over nothing. Using rsync did NOT overwrite anything in the destination folder, i.e. my /opt folder is fine. It turns out that it was just empty to begin with

I’m still having trouble backing up data onto my external hard drive, though. It seems like a permissions thing, Whether I run it as myself or I sudo it, I get thrown back a shizload of “Permission denied” and “Operation not permitted” errors, mainly from the chgrp, chown, mknod, symlink, and even the opendir attempts. I’ve tried to change the group permissions on my ext HDD (again, I don’t know why):
drwx—— 11 joshzam root 32768 2007-06-30 02:05 IOMEGA_HDD
but it doesn’t want to let me. Grrrrr.

I’m happy with how far I’ve come after only meeting Linux just two weeks ago, but I’ve still got a long way to go.

Thanks for the great web site.

By: Josh

Josh — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 18:44:20 +0000

Oh my god, I just realized that if I had included my mp3 directory at the end of that command line I would have lost my entire music collection!!!

By: arsgeek

arsgeek — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 18:40:43 +0000

Ah. You didn’t ad the ‘.’ at the end of /opt in that statement.

What normally resides in /opt? Usually not a whole heck of a lot.

I’ve got a few folders from manual installs that I did (songbird, flash, rainlendar2, vmware) and that’s it.

By: Josh

Josh — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 18:36:33 +0000

I wish I had a backup from before I tried to make a backup!

Your guide looked quite thorough and was exactly what I was looking for. Maybe I have a completely different setup, but it did not work the same for me.

To make a backup of certain folders to my external hard drive, I first navigated to my drive location:
cd /media/IOMEGA_HDD/backup
and tried to enter the following code that you say you use (minus the mp3 directory):
rsync -arvu /home /etc /opt
but I was Denied Permission! So, without totally understanding what I was doing, I changed the command to read:
sudo rsync -arvu /home /etc /opt
and it worked! Kinda. It turns out that my system reads the last location as the destination(!!!) and so a backup of my /home and /etc was placed in my /opt, totally replacing everything that was there beforehand – whatever that was.

I’ve learned a lesson. Now, does anyone know what I may have lost? What normally resides in the /opt directory? Would it be a good idea to reinstall EVERYTHING or can I survive without… whatever it was?

By: 100 Ubuntu Help Links and Guides « Ubuntu OS

100 Ubuntu Help Links and Guides « Ubuntu OS — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 02:04:49 +0000

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By: SharkSpace Blog » Ubuntu (the free linux operating system) guides and resources.

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 16:21:54 +0000

[...] How to back up and restore your Ubuntu machine – an easy to follow guide detailing possible methods to backup and restore Ubuntu. [...]

By: philippe

philippe — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 01:11:13 +0000

Hello

I think that excluding exclude â€œ/var/cache/apt/*â€ /

would still restore the backup but the packages that are install by the restoration would not apear in the synaptic or other packages mangager as installed the would appear as uninstalled tought it is installed

By: Planeta Ubuntu » ArsGeek - Free your inner geek Â» How to back up and restore your Ubuntu machine

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 07:30:21 +0000

[...] Original post by lcdrmike [...]

By: Miguel

Miguel — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 19:28:59 +0000

Hi, how can I backup my system with the tar command into multiple files, I have a fat32 external hdd and can’t create files bigger thatn 4Gb, I get an error when creating my backup