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Daniel Rosehill
Asked: 2019-06-17 01:42:10 +0800 CST

How to backup the whole desktop — without backing up junk?

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I'm looking to take a whole system backup and store it on S3. Something that could be good enough to restore my entire system. But I've been told that using dd/rsync to capture the root directory will save a lot of extraneous files that I wouldn't need to restore the system.

In the event that I had to reply on this backup, I would need to restore:

  • The home directory
  • All installed programs
  • All customizations throughout the system, such as edits to the Openbox configuration file, etc

The command I see recommended here is:

sudo rsync -aAXv / --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found"} /mnt

Is it possible to go lighter than that?

backup rsync

2 Answers

  1. You might look at a combination of Backups (Déjà Dup) for your /home, and Timeshift for the system stuff. Otherwise, use Macrium Reflect to clone your entire disk/partition.

    The closest thing to a Windows-like restore point is by using Timeshift. I use it to save snapshots to an external USB hard drive. Although it can, it's normally not used for backing up your /home directory, just system-level changes. Use Backups (Déjà Dup) for backing up /home files.

    Timeshift is a system restore utility which takes snapshots
of the system at regular intervals. These snapshots can be restored
at a later date to undo system changes. Creates incremental snapshots
using rsync or BTRFS snapshots using BTRFS tools.

    More information at https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift

    For pre-19.04 users, add the PPA:

    sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:teejee2008/ppa

    And install with:

    sudo apt update
sudo apt install timeshift
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  2. From: Bash script to backkup/clone Ubuntu to another partition

    rsync -haxAX --stats --delete --info=progress2 --info=name0 --inplace  \
      /* "$TargetMnt"                                                   \
      --exclude={/dev/*,/proc/*,/sys/*,/tmp/*,/run/*,/mnt/*,/media/*,/lost+found}

    The script also updates /boot/grub/grub.cfg and /etc/fstab so you can boot your backup.

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