SpaceFM?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 9 Jan 2016 14:14:36 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
>You can just save an image of your root and home partitions and go
>back if something is wrong!

A backup of everything is what everybody should do regularly, who set up
a tailor-made environment that fulfils the user's needs. If it isn't a
tailor-made install generating a package list might be ok either.

Making a backup of a complete install requires to shutdown the install
and to do it using another install or a Linux from a live media. While
it's not required to backup all folders, I suggest anyway to backup
everything, to avoid a mistake.

There are a lot of smart tools, but using them requires some knowledge.
I usually don't use such tools, I just use tar.

  sudo -i
  cd /mnt/point/of/the/installs/partition/
  tar -czf /mnt/point/of/the/backup/device/partition/sane_backup_name.bak.tar.gz * .hidden_dir_or_file(s)
  echo "exit status: $?"

That's all, assumed the install has got several partitions, repeat it for
each partition. FWIW usually there are no hidden files, so globbing
doesn't matter and just using the * is ok.

Warnings usually don't matter, assumed the exit status should be 0.

When the backup is finished I open the archive and take a raw look at it's
content, but it also provides a verify option.

  man tar|grep verif
         -W, --verify

It's even possible to use the cp command for a backup.

Since I'm using MBR, I also backup all MBRs. For sda e.g.

  dd if=/dev/sda of=mbr_sda.bak bs=512 count=1

Regards,
Ralf