<div class="gmail_quote">On Jan 11, 2008 7:19 AM, andy baxter <<a href="mailto:andy@earthsong.free-online.co.uk">andy@earthsong.free-online.co.uk</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c">Tim M wrote: > Hi, I have used Sbackup to the small file server I am learning on. I > have tried to restore a couple of times using sbackup and never have > really gotten it to work. Would it be simpler to just backup /home > rather than mess with backing up the other /var, /usr/local and /etc? > The only way I have been completely successful in restoring is by > backing up my home directory. I know it most likely takes much more > time to do completely reload Ubuntu and download updates. I might try > to backup and restore this laptop later today . . . just to see if I > can get it to work. > Tim </div></div>I think that if you try to use a backup program to restore your system files, you are likely to get into trouble. E.g. you need a basic system in place to run the backup program in the first place. So I would recommend that you let the ubuntu installer take care of rebuilding your system if you ever need to, and use the backup program just for your own files. A couple of things which may be useful to make it quicker to rebuild your system: - you can make a log of all installed packages using 'sudo dpkg --get-selections > packages.log'. When you reinstall, you can run 'sudo dpkg --set-selections < packages.log' and 'sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade' (I think) to reinstall everything that was logged as installed before. - all the .debs you have downloaded are kept in /var/cache/apt/archives, so you could back these up to make reinstalling a bit quicker. The way I do things is to have a single partition, mounted as /local, which contains all the files I have created or downloaded myself, and then link this into the main filesystem using symbolic links. e.g. /local/usr => /usr/local /local/home => /home /local/website is an image of my personal website. etc. This means that all the data I need to back up is in one place, and I can back it up easily by just copying everything under /local to my backup device (a partition on a usb hard drive). It also means that if I want to completely reinstall the system, I can do so without risking destroying the files under /local, which are on a separate partition. If you want to back up /etc, this may not work so well though. andy. </blockquote></div>Thanks Andy, I am going to give what you suggested a try. It sounds more logical than the default settings in sbackup. I have had to restore this laptop a couple of times but I always do a complete re-installation. Usually if it isn't working right there is a problem somewhere and it is quicker to re-install that try to figure out where the problem might be. Your idea for storage seems ideal. Thanks. Tim