esqobar

Hi everyone.

I want to backup my entire home folder before moving to Ubuntu Jaunty. Is there any good reason why I can't just show hidden files in Nautilus and copy/paste them to my USB drive?

I've read a lot of stuff on the internet about various backup methods and they all seem overly complicated. I haven't found any advice that says you can just copy/paste. Is there some reason why this is not reliable?

I'm not interested in compression or encryption. I just want normal (Nautilus) access to the files in my backup so I can restore my data folders and some application settings. Any advice would be welcome.

TIA

tpl

> backup entire home directory

try "tar" like this:
cd /usb
tar cf home.tar /home/*

this will make a (large) file "home.tar" on your /usb directory,

to reinstall, "tar xf home.tar"

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esqobar

Hi tpl, thanks for replying.

I have looked at tar. As you say it can be done quite easily in one line, unfortunately my home directory is 32GB. Tar-ing it took 35 mins, which isn't too bad, but extracting a single 50MB folder took 10 - 15 mins which simply isn't acceptable performance.

Tar (as far as I'm aware) reads the tarfiles in a linear fashion (as it would on a tape). Therefore I can understand why there is this long delay. For this reason I started to look at dar, but there is no GUI for that I think since Kdar was dropped and I would like to be able to browse through my backups using a GUI.

I know it's not best practice, but I would just like to copy/paste my files onto my backup drive using Nautilus. I was just wondering if Nautilus had any limitations preventing this from working properly as I am suprised no-one has ever mentioned it that I can find in any guides or forums.

Thanks.

Jonathan183

I suggest you boot from a live CD and cp -a your home folder rather than trying to copy a live file system. You should find the method quicker and more reliable than doing this in a gui. It also preserves file permissions and ownership

esqobar

Thanks Jonathan. I was considering the cp command and was halfway through a script, but I was not aware of the -a switch. After looking into it, cp -a is exactly what I need

I'm not averse to using the command line, I am just not convinced by the more convoluted methods you old-school Linux pros recommend for backing-up! I'm a simple guy & I just want to move my stuff to a removable drive.

So you think it best to run this command from a live CD? Could I not just log out of the gui and do this in a console (Ctrl-alt-f1) as root?

Jonathan183

Keep in mind root account by default in Ubuntu is disabled (and I would tend to leave it disabled). This means the root login method is not going to work.

You could get away with login as root (if you enable it) ... I just prefer doing this sort of thing from a live CD that way there is no possibility of processes running and modifying the system part way through the copy process, ending up with inconsistent info.

I'm not a pro ... which is one reason I use the live CD method - less to go wrong

esqobar

Yeah, I agree. I think that came out a bit wrong. I would never attempt to login as root. I meant to say use sudo on the cp command.

Anyhoo, thanks very much for your input. I'll be trying that as soon as the heat here drops to a level that won't melt my HDDs!

Ziplock

Hi there,

I like rsync for this kind of thing myself

This has the advantage of copying over only new files if you do it more than once

esqobar

Hi Ziplock, thanks for replying.

I did look at rsync. It is a great tool, but I want to do a "1-time backup" style of backup rather than incremental. I don't want to be overwriting files in the same backup directory over and over. Rather, for my preferred backup solution, I will eg. take a full backup for June and then another for July. I will then delete June and backup August. Then delete July and backup September, etc, etc.

I appreciate it will take longer to back up and use up more space, but I have loads of space to play around with and I see this as the safest way to do things. Not sure what you think.

esqobar

Dunno what I'm thinking, we're in July now aren't we?!