Lack of Documentation on how to do a full system back up

Getting Help
21

I’m currently sick and don’t have much time, I’d like to thank all of you for helping each other! That’s awesome!

2 Likes
22

Thanks @jedi453,

You’re right I should test this first. I’ll make sure to read your updated post when you elaborate on what you’ve written.

Some thoughts on your points:

  1. Thanks for mentioning the /boot partition, completely forgot that.

  2. I orginally installed fedora 26 and upgraded to fedora 27. The backup I did with restic is my current version which is fedora 27, can I confirm that I need the LiveUSB of fedora 27 and not fedora 26?

  3. fedora Workstation is the operating system for laptops and desktops, the others being fedora server for servers and fedora atomic for Linux-Docker-Kubernetes (LDK) application stacks.

  4. Good point.

  5. Same as 2 above.
    I will test test the restore.

  6. Thanks for confirming I don’t need to install GRUB.

  7. skipped.

  8. Thanks for explaining, now I understand.

  9. I suspected that might be the case.

  10. Thanks for recommending VirtualBox. Are you recommending a virtual machine over an external USB Hard Drive? Is this because if things go wrong it could permanently mess up the exernal USB Hard Drive? If so, wouldn’t re-formating the external USB Hard Drive fix this?

  11. Thats okay, GParted seems to be the standard Hard Disk partitioner.

I appreciate your help greatly. I know and understand the risks. It’s my responsibility. I will run a test on either an external Hard Drive or VirtualBox to test the entire process first. Thanks for the ubuntu link its an easy read. Why do you recommend bsdtar instead of tar?

To add to what I’ve said, restic is much more convenient for me to use for this case because I generally want to move away from logging around physical storage. As a contigency I have ordered a large external Hard Drive and I will make two backups. The first using restic which is already in my respository and the second using tar or bsdtar from the ubuntu link you provided. That way If restic doesn’t work I have another restoration option.

One last thing, its been several days since I backed up my whole system my restic repository. Would it be a bad idea to backup my system again before going ahead with the re-installation so that when I re-install I have the most up to date backup? I have not installed anything since then but I have been using the command line line frequency and also browsing and I would like to have the most up-to-date bash history and internet browsing activity when I re-install.

23

@randUser - it can definitely be used for a whole filesystem; databases were just one example. LVM snapshots are also useful, for example, if you’re doing a risky update or just want to conduct some tests - you can quickly reapply an LVM snapshot over the top of your existing data, etc (i.e. revert to it).

24

it still beats doing a backup over a period of 10-20+ minutes in a changing filesystem, no? or did you have a better solution in mind?

in fact, this is something I was wondering about restic in general - could it support filesystem snapshots natively? in borg this was rejected as being out of scope (although there’s some work to support Windows snapshots, for some strange reason), but I was wondering if it would be relevant here…

1 Like