[SOLVED] Backing up home folder

[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"

[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

rsync -av <source> <destination>

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?!