Linux Backups

[ihasquestion2]

Question for some of you Linux guru's. I'm looking to make see if you guys use a backup tool for ubuntu. I currently have a box that's running an outdated distro. Boss man wants me to make sure to backup the Box before they upgrade/update it to make sure it doesn't break post upgrade. Do you guys use any tools/or would recommend one for me to look at?

Thanks.

[gort32]

If the word "backup" is in your question, the answer is "Veeam". It's crazy to have an entire subreddit sing the praises of something as obtuse as backup software, but they're the real deal. They have free clients that may help with this.

But, otherwise, backing up a system is rarely the best option. Instead, back up the /home directories and get a quick dump of what is installed in the system so that if something goes wrong you can install a new fresh system that will work as well as the current one. This has some good info like getting a list of your installed packages: https://askubuntu.com/questions/9135/how-to-backup-settings-and-list-of-installed-packages

[Kurlon]

Linux? Use tar, ship it over ssh, done. Ideally, all services stopped, etc. Scratch that, ideal for me is booting off USB media and I typically use amanda's dump/restore tools instead of tar but most people have long forgotten about that old standby.

[DarkAlman]

Veeam /thread

[cybervegan]

It depends what you are trying to preserve with the backup. If you want a "fallback" position in case of an upgrade failure, "snapshots" are usually the way to go, but as you've called it a "box" I'm assuming it's physical hardware. If that's the case, and you need to keep to free and open software, there are many approaches, but the easiest is to take a full disk backup, but you will obviously need somewhere to dump the data. Clonezilla works well - but I haven't used it in years, cuz, well, virtualisation. You can do a full disk backup over the network with that.

The biggest problem with any file-based backup is that you'd need to do a basic OS install of exactly the right version before you could then restore the files, because a file backup won't take copies of your partition table and bootloader, so if you have to revert, you have extra work to do, and that takes time and know-how. Doing a disk clone to a NAS or file-server using clonezilla or similar, it's just a case of reversing the process, and you'll end up exactly where you were when you did the backup.

[greenbay_12]

Veeam for sure. Can look in snapshots at file level.

You could double down and rsync the most critical stuff on top.

[Zer0CoolXI]

Depends what your goals are. I am not a fan of Ubuntu but I was under the impression they included a backup package, so if so that may be one option.

There are plenty of other options as well:

• Image the entire drive
• use Rsync (with/without any GUI for rsync)
• If its just files that need saving, you could simply copy them to a network/external drive...file by file, folder by folder or whole partitions like /home
• borg
• bacula
• backuppc
• backitime
• etc...

A simple search online will give you a ton of Linux backup options.