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

[Bo Berglund]

On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 22:03:01 +0100, Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie>
wrote:

>On 25/04/2020 21:22, Colin Law wrote:
>[...]
>> The recommendation is to backup the whole system, at least that is how
>> I read it.  Whether it is a sensible recommendation I am not sure.
>
>In general, yes, it would always be a good idea to have a backup of the 
>entire system, but in practice — for the normal end-user — this is 
>overkill.
>
...
>
>The big IFF is for people who are *not* "normal end-users". If you have 
>used admin privs (sudo) to modify the system installation, perhaps 
>editing system-wide config files, then you are on your way to becoming a 
>systems administrator, and you will (of course) have kept a notebook 
>detailing all the changes you have made, so that they can be tested and 
>reapplied if necessary on a new system :-)
>
>So the test is: have you made changes outside /home/<name> that you want 
>to carry forward to a new system? Do you know what those changes are, 
>and when and where they were made?

Yes I *have* made system changes:

Installed using sudo apt install:
- ubuntu-mate-desktop
- openvpn
- openssh-server
- gnome-tweaks
- libcanberra-gtk-module
- pm-utils
- vnc4server

Sudo edited control files:
- /etc/environment
- /etc/hosts
- /etc/fstab
- /etc/pam.d/vncserver (to set the vnc desktop properties)
- /etc/systemd/system/vncserver at .service (for vnc to operate properly)
- /etc/systemd/logind.conf (to allow running with the lid closed)
- /etc/default/grub
- /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume
- /etc/rc.local (to install an IP address reporting utility)

There are probably more than these (which I got from history)... 

>If you want to do a system-wide backup it's very easy using a tool like 
>rsync to copy everything except the mount-point where your external USB 
>drive is attached. Copying it back in the case of wanting to revert is 
>much harder, because you risk overwriting the executing system (which 
>you want to do, of course, but not while it's executing!). This is where 
>a specifically-designed backup tool is needed (like timeshift).

I found a backup utility in the Mate application menu
Accessories/Backups
When started it puts an item in the task bar named:
"Deja Dup Backup Tool" (accents removed)

So I ran it for ~/ and it created an 800 MB set of files in ~/Backups
(I excluded ~/Backups and ~/Downloads from the backup)

Maybe I should have included /etc in the backup as well, but 
Backups did not ask for my password so it might not be allowed to
backup from /etc...

So then I decided to simply run this instead:
sudo tar -cvzf ~/Backups/etcbackup_20200426T1104.tgz /etc/

Is this utility a tool that comes with Ubuntu or is it from the Mate
Desktop installation?


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden