Upgrading to Ubuntu 20, *how* to back up?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:45:55 +0100, Colin Law wrote:
>I am not going to give any advice on this just in case it all goes
>pear shaped, but I have never had a problem that trashed the system
>doing an upgrade of a working ubuntu to the next release, and I have
>never backed up the operating system itself.

Good points! While your concerns regarding not giving an advice are
wise, updates could be fishy due to possible kernel
regressions, possible discontinued packages that are needed or important
software from third parties might be missing.

>Obviously any important data I have will already be backed up

That's vital, even when not doing anything risky, since hardware could
get borked.

>check that the backups are ok (and then probably make a completely
>independent backup again just in case).  Then I go for it and do a
>backup using the provided utilities.

Indeed, apart from diff a cp, simply opening a tar archive should be
done.

>The couple of times I have lost a system have both been due to disc
>failure and I think losing a system is much more likely due to this
>than a backup going wrong.

I second that. Backups could go wrong, but usually command line output
informs about IO errors and other issues.

>What I do, however, to ease the process of recovering a lost system is
>to use Ansible for building my machines, so after re-installing the OS
>the process of getting the system back to a running state is almost
>trivial.

I backup from copies and tar archives, if hardware gets broken,
software such as vbox ;) does cause issues that can't be solved by
other measures or if I made a fatal user error. cp and tar are my
friends. I'm rotating backup drives, in case a backup drive should
fail, too or if I shouldn't have notice an issue that happened a long
time ago, so that I need an older backup instead of the latest.