I've just (hopefully) backed-up my Ubuntu system using a script provided via this link: Howto: Backup and restore your system! - Ubuntu Forums In my case, I used an external USB drive for my archive storage file media. The script and instructions to run it seemed clear and easy to understand and the backup proceeded and finished without any problems - I just hope that a restore, if one was ever needed, would be as easy - not to mention successful! Any comments on this particular backup procedure would be appreciated along with suggested alternative means of backing up Ubuntu. All I would like now is something of similar simplicity to backup my Mandriva 2006 partition. EDIT: Come to think of it - would it be likely that the script would work for Mandriva? David.
That script just seems to be using tar to archive the system directories. This is actually system independent, and it should also work with Mandriva.
It might be a bit late to tell you, but if you have a large collection of media for example, and you already have backups of that, then you can just exclude the directory from tar and make a backup of the media separately. You should still backup system directories, but I think backing up 2GB of music over and over again would be a waste of time and a waste of storage space. This is just what I would do anyway, you're free to backup everything if you want.
Yes, no problem, Addis. I had already excluded stuff I had already backed-up by other means. Right, I have now also ran the script in Mandriva and it has worked! However, I did have a 'false start', so to speak. I decided to also save the backup archive file to my external USB drive (as I did with Unbuntu's backup archive). I had expected that a new archive file would be created in Mandriva and I would now have 2 archive files on my external USB drive - one for Ubuntu and one for Mandriva. Well, Ubuntu's archive file was simply 'modified/overwritten' (best as I can understand it) by the newly-created Mandriva archive file. I guess it's logical when you think about it. Anyway, I have created the Mandriva archive on the root filing system and will probably transfer it over to the USB drive at a later stage. I have re-ran the script in Ubuntu and saved the resulting archive file back on the USB drive. Any thoughts on doing subsequent backups to those archive files? In other words, could I perform future backups on a differential basis rather than delete those archives and start afresh each time I wanted to backup both systems?
I've since been advised to 'keep things simple' and perform a new backup each time. I did this under disk-imaging when I was running Windows. I would always keep a backup archive that I knew worked on restore (well, Windows gave me many opportunities to test a backup out because of the amount of times it crashed on me!) plus I always did a latest backup of my system. Anyway, thanks for your input. I'll just have to wait and see if the backups of Mandriva and Ubuntu work. However, I feel it might be a while before I have to put them to the test thanks to the stability of Linux.
Keeping it simple is good advice but doing a full system backup everytime will get old real fast. If you're only backup up 2-8GB of data maybe it won't. I just tackled my USB harddrive backup problem. Although I couldn't find a practical differential backup program, I did find that rsync will work for me. Rsync should be available for Ubuntu and Mandriva. It is usually used to syncronize two drives (or directories) over a network but it will work on a local drive as well. So far I have only used it manually (just set it up 2 days ago) First I set up the external drive to be partitioned similar to the file systems I want to backup then mount the drive's partitions. Then I do this: Code: # rsync -Cav /directory_to_backup/ /external_drive and everything in the source directory and sub-directories is backed up. Like to backup your home directory (or directories): Code: # rsync -Cav /home/ /mnt/external_drive Then subsequent backups would be done like this: Code: # rsync -Cav --delete /home/ /mnt/external_drive --delete gets rid of any files that have be removed since last backup. To simplify, if you have the space: Code: # rsync -Cav / /mnt/external_drive then you get everything copied over. It isn't very graceful yet but I hope to write this into a script when I have time. On the other hand there is this script already available. :doh: Also see these: rsync man page rsync wiki entry Hope that helps. I love rsync.
kenji san, Thank you very much. I'm sure it will be a great help - I'll give it a study and check-out the link for additional information. My backups for both Mandriva and Ubuntu result in rather small .tgz archive files (well, at present they do!), so doing a fresh backup is not so much of a chore, I guess. However, I can see the relevance of 'rsync' for the larger backups. David.
