[ubuntu-uk] Backing Up Ubuntu

[Alan Pope]

2009/1/7 Jai Harrison <jai at jaiharrison.com>:
> I have an external 1 terabyte HDD and would like to back up my Ubuntu
> system onto it for easy restoration later if I accidentally wipe the
> internal drive or it fails. Unfortunately my external HDD is using
> NTFS format (because I would like to be able to allow Windows users to
> access the drive whilst also storing >4gig files making fat32
> impossible).
>
> My question is is there a way I can back up my entire system onto an
> NTFS system understanding that it doesn't support Unix permissions or
> filenames (a lot of characters are illegal on NTFS). Or will I have to
> resize my NTFS partition on the external drive and create an ext3 on
> alongside it for storage?
>

backup-manager is your friend.

Install then (optionally) edit /etc/backup-manager.conf and set
BM_REPOSITORY_ROOT to the path to your target folder, and set
BM_ARCHIVE_METHOD to (optionally) "tarball-incremental". Each day it
will run and backup your system. You'll get a full backup on a
Saturday, and incrementals (only changes since Saturday through the
week. I use it for backing up a bunch of machines over the network to
the network attached storage device whose name I am not allowed to
utter.

By default it will only backup /home and /etc, but you can change that too.

Cheers,
Al.