Ubuntu

how do I back up 8.10 to a CD?

Asked by Dan Smith

I installed 8.10 on an old gateway win98 with 10gb HD, celeron 800, 512mb ram. I did so with the alternate CD from cheapbytes. I don't know if it's important but I think it boots from (hd0,0)ext3, which means that I don't recall what the HD looks like, or remember which partition option I chose, if I even had an option. I suppose this is more than I need to supply for my question, but I don't want to spend all day with back-and-forths any more than I have to. The first problem is that I want to back up my "home" directory, which I hope and assume contains my surf history, passwords, settings and preferences. I didn't knowingly create any directories. I installed hubackup to simply(I hope) save those to a CD, assuming there's no need for anything else, since the object here is to upgrade to 9.04. The first problem I have, however, is this machine doesn't seem to even know there's a CD drive, with or without the blank CD in it. Thanks for any help. Dan

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Dan Smith (sentol) said : 		#1

I forgot something that I'd bet is going to be another problem: I took the encryption option for the "personal directory". Oh, my!

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Dan Smith (sentol) said : 		#2

Just found out something else: It's a CD-Rom. I'm going to use a two-gig thumb drive. Any advice anyway?

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Josh Kupershmidt (schmiddy) said : 		#3

Hi Dan,
How you choose to backup your computer depends on your goals. For instance, you might want to:
  1. have a single/few backup copies of important documents you've created in case of catastrophe
  2. want to be able to restore your entire system to a pristine snapshot ("full backup")
  3. be able to restore your system or just important documents to any of several past versions in case of unnoticed corruption, deletion, etc ("incremental backup")

How you backup your system depends on your goals. You probably want *at least* #1 above, but possibly more. If you can more clearly articulate your goals and/or fears (i.e. what sort of catastrophe are you trying to guard against? system failure? important document loss?) someone might be able to help you further...
 - josh

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Dan Smith (sentol) said : 		#4

Thanks for replying. I've never upgraded in the usual way so don't know what the risks are. I'm sure you could tell from my post that I'm very green also. I don't even know where my surf history, passwords, FF settings and preferences are stored but surely aren't in the system files, so I just assumed they'd be in my "home" directory. I'm trying to avoid re-entering all that stuff as much as possible. I just want a CD copy of that. System failure's not a concern as I still have Live-CD's of 8.10 and 9.04. I have no important documents to recreate. I just want to avoid a lot of extra work if the upgrade fails for some reason. What I specifically don't know now is how to get the home directory onto the flash drive. The icon is on the desktop. Thanks josh and please be VERY specific.

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Josh Kupershmidt (schmiddy) said : 		#5

Hi Dan,
From what you're saying it sounds like you want a simple snapshot of your home directory, so that you can preserve your current settings and passwords. Assuming your home directory is small enough to fit on your flash drive[1], you can simply drag and drop your home directory's icon into the icon for your flash drive[2] and it should copy everything.

For future reference, your firefox settings, preferences, and bookmarks are all stored in the hidden[3] directory called ".mozilla" directly underneath your home directory. Various other passwords and configurations for your desktop environment and applications you use will be stored in similar hidden folders in your home directory.

Footnotes:
 [1] you can right click on the icon for /home/your_user_name from the file browser and select properties to see the total directory size if you want to make sure your home directory will fit on your flash drive
 [2] When you plug your flash drive into your computer, you should see an icon for the drive appear on your desktop -- this is where you want to drag your home folder into
 [3] to see hidden directories from the file browser, go to View -> Show Hidden Files

 hope this helps
 - josh

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