Well, when it comes to twidling around with Linux installation, I am a newbie. Usually my experiments end up with me not knowing how to reverse the side effects. I have no choice other than to live with the problems created. But periodically I have to do a complete reinstall of my system to keep it running well (also because after a certain point I cannot bear to see all the broken application, dead links and innumerable errors). Earlier it was a pain to do complete reinstall, because I would lose all my configuration files unless I explicitely saved them. Thus began my search to discover a backup tool for ubuntu.
I stumbled across this thread which says that all you need to do is to make a tar of all your files, thus saving the present state of ubuntu. If a restore is required, just expand the archive. This can be done on a running system too. Just restart after the exoansion is done, and the ubuntu gets restored to its state when the zarchive was created.
However, archiving all the files requires a lot of space. Also it takes time to everytime archive all the files. An alternative option I came across was to sync the files. I have used this method to create a backup of all my files. Sync is much faster than creating tar archive because sync only copies the files that have been modified since the last sync operation.
I have opted to backup only my /home/anu folder. This is what needs to be done.
rsync -av /home/anu /media/Downloads/syncUbuntu
rsync is the command used to sync the files. /home/anu is my user directory. I have an externally mounted USB drive. It shows up in /media with the label Downloads. I have created a new folder syncUbuntu within this drive to contain my sync files. Now all I have to do is run the above command and my files get sync with the files already present in the syncUbuntu folder.
The first time that you run the command takes time as all the files have to be copied. However the next time onwards the process requires hardly a few seconds. It is a great way to backup the system. And now I know I have all my files backed up to be called upon whenever needed.
To make the process easier, I created an alias in the bashrc file. I named it backup. This is the line that I added
alias backup=’rsync -av /home/anu /media/Downloads/syncUbuntu’
To backup my files, I now need to type backup in my terminal and I’m done.
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