What and how are the best ways to backup the system?

[dagmann]

My system is currently updated, stable, with everythng I loaded is working.
So I want to backup my entire system.
Let's assume my disk died, so I format a new disk, now to load my it how?
What is the best tool for backups?
And I would want to backup to a dvd drive.

[Snowhog]

I wouldn't recommend using a DVD for backing up your system. You'd have to use quite a few DVD's to do so. Not practical.

Get yourself an external USB Hard Drive of equal or larger capacity than the drive your system is installed on. These days, they are not very expensive. Create a LiveUSB or LiveCD of Clonezilla you can boot from and use to create your backups. It's what I use. Clonezilla is 'tried and true'.

[dagmann]

Thanks for reply.

Do you use Tuxboot with Clonezilla?

[claydoh]

There is no 'best' way, only what works best for your needs.

I personally only back up my home directory, since I am a more or less 'average' desktop user. It is much quicker and easier for me to wipe a drive and start over, and restore my user data and settings than it is to restore a disk image. But that does not work for everyone.

[dagmann]

There is no 'best' way, only what works best for your needs.

I personally only back up my home directory, since I am a more or less 'average' desktop user. It is much quicker and easier for me to wipe a drive and start over, and restore my user data and settings than it is to restore a disk image. But that does not work for everyone.

I completely agree!
Thanks for the help.

[jglen490]

I also only backup my /home. It's simple, it takes little time, and with a revolving set of (now) four external USB connectable hard drives, it's very safe/recoverable. If my OS partition blows up, it's (for now) on a separate drive from my data anyway. I have the latest "point" release of Kubuntu LTS, so replacing the / partition drive is nothing more than a clean install away. Clean installs are easy to do, and take very little of my time. I can be doing something else while it runs, once I've stepped through the first little bit of the "something else" install option.

Read a book, watch a football or baseball game, eat lunch, go to the store, any number of other things. No hovering necessary. I've obtained a few smaller SSDs to use as an OS drive, should the current one die, or any other little computing projects that come up like using a Raspberry PI device with an old laptop display and an old but useful 2.1 speaker system to make simple multimedia computer that can hang on a wall or wherever.

[jlittle]

Clean installs...
Read a book, watch a football or baseball game, eat lunch, go to the store...

That's a very short book or game, or the store is very close. I can do a clean Kubuntu install in seven minutes, from reboot (into the iso on an SSD, so no time spent writing to a USB stick) to "install complete".

[GreyGeek]

Four or five years ago I began using the BTRFS as my root file system. You can select it in the part of the installation where you do a manual partition of your HD/SSD and select BTRFS. When it installs it gives you two subvolumes (BTRFS lingo), one called @ (root or /) and the other @home (/home).
The care and feeding of BTRFS is explained in the BTRFS subforum of this forum.

When it is time to back up I open a Konsole (I eschew Snapper, TimeShift or similar apps) and issue "sudo -i". As root I mount FSROOT of BTRFS to /mnt

Here is a listing of my history from last night:

[COLOR=#000000][FONT=monospace] 129  mount -t btrfs /dev/disk/by-uuid/35014dcc-2b24-4bab-a13b-8c8aabf59ce9 /mnt[/FONT][/COLOR]
[FONT=monospace]  130  mount -t btrfs /dev/disk/by-uuid/e84e2cdf-d635-41c5-9f6f-1d0235322f48 /backup[/FONT]
[FONT=monospace]  131  vdir /mnt/snapshots/[/FONT]
[FONT=monospace]  132  vdir /backup/[/FONT]
[FONT=monospace]  133  btrfs su snapshot -r /mnt/@ /mnt/snapshots/@20191010          <--- backing up root[/FONT]
[FONT=monospace]  134  btrfs su snapshot -r /mnt/@home /mnt/snapshots/@home20191010  <--- backing up home[/FONT]
[FONT=monospace]  135  vdir /backup/                                                 <--- checking for the 20191002 bkups[/FONT]
[FONT=monospace]  136  btrfs send -p /mnt/snapshots/@20191002 /mnt/snapshots/@20191010 | btrfs receive /backup <--- Incremental backup[/FONT]
[FONT=monospace]  137  sync[/FONT]
[FONT=monospace]  138  btrfs send -p /mnt/snapshots/@home20191002 /mnt/snapshots/@home20191010 | btrfs receive /backup[/FONT]
[FONT=monospace]  139  sync[/FONT]
[FONT=monospace]  140  btrfs filesystem usage /backup <--- checking for amount of free space[/FONT]
[FONT=monospace]  141  btrfs filesystem usage /mnt[/FONT]
[FONT=monospace]  142  vdir /backup[/FONT]
[FONT=monospace]  143  vdir /mnt/snapshots/[/FONT]
[FONT=monospace]  144  umount /backup[/FONT]
[FONT=monospace]  145  umount /mnt[/FONT]
[FONT=monospace]  146  exit [/FONT]
[FONT=monospace] exit [/FONT]
[FONT=monospace][/FONT]

Using the UUID is preferred to using /dev/sdXn for reasons explained in the BTRFS subforum.
Backing up the the remote storage is a lot faster using an incremental backup. Only the difference between the 02 and the 10 snapshots are sent to the remote storage, where receive takes the 02 subvolume and adds to it the stuff sent over, saving it as 10.

Total time to back up last night: less than 5 minutes. I use the history command to retrieve previous commands and edit them for today's date. IT I needed to restore (using both the root and home snapshots of the same date) it will take me about 2-3 minutes using the subvolumes in snapshots and about 5 minutes IF I have to import them from /backup. I also have two USB HDs large enought to hold two sets of subvolume snapshots.

IF I want to restore an inadvertently deleted file or app, I merely browse the snapshot using MC and copy the file right out of the snapshot subvolume into my system, because @, @somedate, @home aand @homesomedate can be browsed like a directory.

[hallergard]

I prefer backing up the entire partition using partimage if on ext3 or partclone if on ext4 - no separate partitions for / home etc https://tinyurl.com/y35p5zts

[jglen490]

That's a very short book or game, or the store is very close. I can do a clean Kubuntu install in seven minutes, from reboot (into the iso on an SSD, so no time spent writing to a USB stick) to "install complete".

That's cool. The point is there is no need to clone/backup/copy OS files. And if there's an error somewhere in those files, you've just backed up the error. Now, I'm not talking about tools like Timeshift and others that are not backup solutions, but are rather point in time recovery solutions when an OS change introduces an error or incompatibility. I've never encountered any of that, as I stick solely to LTS on my main desktop unit. I'll play with my laptop all day long.