back-up, rescue and restore solutions

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I finally got 11.2 installed just the way I want it.
All the right applications, tweaks and repositories.
Setup just right!
But you know that this wet-behind-the-ears newbie and his experiments are bound to mess things up.
Trying to adjust this or adding that and BOOM!
I have lost my net connection or network Manager installing WICD.
Worse yet, made my system un-bootable or my hard drive died!.
Because of my level or in-experience and limited Linux knowledge, these calamities end up forcing me to do a re-install.
Yes, I keep the latest install media on hand.

Is there a way to set up or re-install my system just the way I have it running now?
Can I set-up a rescue, back-up or start-up disk, USB stick or external drive?
Can I do a back-up that will allow me to re-install, recover my current set-up on my current machine?

How do you cope with these situations?

Thanks,

Rr

2

full system backup

glance at 14k opinons on how, here: http://tinyurl.com/yzzsvzl

pick the one best suited to your level of ability and patience to grow
in Linux system administration…

a good backup is RULE ONE…actually it comes before then

–
palladium

3

I’m interested in hearing of a good backup routine. I’ve formulated one sort-of (once I can clear the rsync logs so it will sync everything) for Ubuntu but need to figure out how to do the same with openSUSE.

One piece that is important is to what you are going to backup to and how much is it worth?

You could copy the just your /home directory and plan on re-installing the OS if/when things go bork, or you could backup the entire partition to clone over to a new hard drive.

rsync (and grsync, the gui front-end) are pretty good for copying files from one location to another providing you don’t mind doing some command-line scripts.

Back-in-Time is an alright snapshot gui application but I haven’t managed to get it to only snapshot differentials for some reason. It does have a KDE interface.

What I look at doing is

  • backup the list of repositories into something on the /home directory (/home/BACKUPS)
  • backup the list of applications installed into something on the /home directory (/home/BACKUPS)
  • backup any modified files that are not already pointed to the /home directory (Apache web pages, MySQL database, etc.)
  • backup the entire /home directory in a variety of means. Don’t forget the hidden folders (prefixed with a “.” to make it hidden)

So in this way, I can go to a new hard drive (failed system? upgrade? etc.), install the base system, add the repositories back and run the list of applications installed. Before or after that can copy my /home directory items to my new /home which will contain my settings as well as programs.

The more tweaking you do, though, the more this gets complicated.

I am setting it up this way because I figure I can always get a new system and install the base or from a LiveCD to start with and these changes just align up my personalizations.