How to take a backup in ubuntu

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 10:31 AM, Amrit Pal Pathak <
amritpalpathak1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> How to  take a backup of ubuntu? How to create a restore point on HD
> (a partition other than ubuntu 's installation) so that i can restore
> it  when i installed new ubuntu.I don't want to install  a lot of
> package /software again and again with each installation.
>
> There are lots of answers.  I tend to use the basic UNIX tools that have
been around forever,
and treat this problem as no different from any other backup situation.
The advantage is that the tools are robust, and will not change any time
soon, and my backups
are usable on just about any *N*X system.

Design points
1) I have live CD's and DVD's that will boot a system without touching any
of the other drives;
   this is crucial for restoring a broken system, either infected or
non-bootable.
2) I have high-capacity "internal" drives -- 1 and 2 TB -- which I use
externally in USB/SATA docks,
    so that I can take some of the drives off-site.  That means I leave it
with a friend.  The off-site
    drive is rotated once in a while.  I use internal drives because it
saves a little money; you could
    use external drives and save some worries about their safety.
3) I mount the drive when I want to use it, and leave it offline otherwise
(ideally --- in practice I
    sometimes leave it for a long while by accident.)
4) I copy either directly or to another system via SSH, using scripts I have
written.  I copy a whole
    directory or drive to a single file, using a tool appropriate to the
situation:
    - dd(1) and gzip(1) for FAT partitions
    - ntfsclone(1) for NTFS partitions
    - tar -cf for normal unix directories, usually with the options
         --exclude-caches-under  --one-file-system --exclude=.gvfs --gzip

5)  In addition, some meta information is also saved (output of df, complete
fdisk listings to reconstruct partions if necessary)
  For example, the scripts have things like
     fdisk /dev/sda <<EOF  >/$drive/$loc/$loc.fdisk-sda-$date.txt
     p
     x
     p
     r
     c
     u
     p
     x
     p
     q
     EOF
6) Each file has a name with several parts, some derived from the
environment, some from
    shell parameters
    - the machine name (we have 1 desktop and 3 laptops at home)
    - a name for the data (root, home, etc)
    - a date stamp
    - an extension indicating the format

This all took a while to get going, but I'm now quite comfortable with it.
It keeps logs on the systems being backed up,
so i can tell where the most recent data is, as well as on the backup drives
so I can see what's there.

All of this is bash scripting with commands known to just about any *N*X
system administrator in the last 40 years:
   bash, dd, gzip, tar, date, wc, test, df, fdisk, mount, umount, grep
plus the somewhat newer
   ntfsclone

My backup is then started by root:
   ~/scripts/bkun.sh 2tb
to take a backup of all Ubuntu stuff to the drive mounted on /2tb.  This
mount point is bound to a specific drive UUID,
so it's always the same one.  The script balks if there's no disk mounted
there.

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
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