Linux newbie needs to know what to backup

Asked by coolgenes

I have spent a lot of time "tweaking" a Linux box (Ubuntu-Jaunty) with Samba shares and will soon set up LAMP for a Wiki etc. In the case that I will upgrade to Karmic or somesuch in the future I would like to have a backup of my system (not data) that I could do a full restore and my raid and samba share etc. would still be intact. What do I need to backup? I know this is a bit off topic of just BiT but I am nervous of losing all my time and effort. Thanks for any help you can provide

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Bart de Koning (bratdaking) said :
#1

For this case BackinTime is not the best solution, it can do it, no problem.
But for this you do not need incremental backups, so you can go for
compression methods or filesystem copies. You can have a look at old school
tar for example (commandline based):
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=35087

You can also copy your whole filesystem (if you have plenty of free space)
using gparted -> make sure you change the UUID of your copy though otherwise
your system will start throwing dices to assume which of the two it has to
mount. Or dump the whole filesystem in a file:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-do-i-make-linux-filesystem-backup-with-dd.html.
These last two options use a lot of space, as they are both the same size of
the original filesystem (so not only the part that is actually used, it
copies the whole filesystem!)

In depends also a little bit about on what you call tweaking. Most of the
things you describe are stored in simple conf files (/etc/fstab for your
samba shares) so you could also decide to backup your configuration files,
and restore the rest directly from the Jaunty repositories.
If you tweak your system it is more important to remember what you did and
how you did it, as with future releases and upgrades you most probably will
have to do it again sometime.

Good luck!
(Setting up a LAMP in Jaunty is by the way quite easy: use tasksel from the
command line and select LAMP server. Do not forget to tweak your php.conf as
the standard configuration is not really safe)

2009/11/5 coolgenes <email address hidden>

> New question #88772 on Back In Time:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/backintime/+question/88772
>
> I have spent a lot of time "tweaking" a Linux box (Ubuntu-Jaunty) with
> Samba shares and will soon set up LAMP for a Wiki etc. In the case that I
> will upgrade to Karmic or somesuch in the future I would like to have a
> backup of my system (not data) that I could do a full restore and my raid
> and samba share etc. would still be intact. What do I need to backup? I
> know this is a bit off topic of just BiT but I am nervous of losing all my
> time and effort. Thanks for any help you can provide
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are an answer
> contact for Back In Time.
>

Revision history for this message
deLeewit (thomsin) said :
#2

Quickstart is a nice set of utilities. It can back up your complete system compressed. It also can back up your ubuntu partitions, windows partition and mbr (for double-booters).
I use it once a month to backup my partitions to a usb drive. I guess it's really a frontend for tar, rsync, parted etc.
Check it out at:
http://www.quickstart.freeforums.org/quickstart-download-pics-t2.html

Revision history for this message
habtool (clive-wagenaar) said :
#3

The one current limitation with quickstart is that it does not support backing up ext4 partitions.
There was talk by the developer of quickstart to use fsarchiver, but to date there is no support for ext partitions.
(it still uses partimage that only supports up to ext3 and is no longer being developed)

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