Dtyjlui

Noone noticed clonezilla. It makes a complete image of your hard drive, so it backups absolutely everything. It's as easy as burning an iso or creating a bootable flash drive.

The actual backup takes a while, but is the most reliable.

To clone your system to another system. Or make a backup. In terminal type:

dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall > ubuntu-files

This command makes a file list of all installed packages in your system (and stores it in present working directory). Backup this file in hdd, email, etc...(this file is very small).

In the freshly installed ubuntu system run:

sudo dpkg --set-selections <./ubuntu-files (will set it up and)



apt-get -y update

apt-get dselect-upgrade

This will install only those packages you had installed (with apt-get) in the old system.

                                    (OR)

You could back up all the .deb packages from /var/cache/apt/archives/ and install them manually using:

dpkg -i *.deb

And after that running an update cycle later.

You can use Remastersys to create a bootable live CD/DVD image. This will install like a normal Ubuntu CD.

To install Remastersys, you first need to add a repository:

deb http://www.geekconnection.org/remastersys/repository karmic/

You can then install it from the Software Centre as usual.

Once installed, use it to make a 'dist' backup. This means that user data will be excluded from the ISO image.

This is often used to create custom distributions but is still useful for the backup task you have in mind. One caveat is that it may fail if the contents of / (minus user data in /home) takes up too much memory because the ISO file format can only hold ~4GB data. Remastersys uses a file system called squashfs to compress your data so you should be OK with up to ~8GB.

Try Remastersys.

With that program you can do liveCD (just the same as Ubuntu installation iso file) of your system with ability to install it on hard drive. Works pretty simple (if you know how to burn iso to USB/CD/DVD).

Works perfectly on my 11.10 and 11.04, and older ones as well.

Installation:

edit file /etc/apt/sources.list

add: # Remastersys
deb http://www.geekconnection.org/remastersys/repository karmic/ and save

Then run in terminal:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install remastersys

Here is a solution I use with SquashFS. It is quite similar to TAR.GZ solution proposed earlier, but has some major benefits.

SquashFS is a compressed file system, which is completely stored in one file. This file can be mounted to an existing system and accessed in a usual way, like any other partition. The difference to TAR.GZ is that SquashFS is a full-blown file system with random access to files, while TAR is just one big concatenated file.

This means that if you want to mount some large backup of your whole file system, for TAR.GZ it would take like 5 hours (in my experience) and for SquashFS it would take just minutes/seconds. The same is true also for the compression/backup operation, SquashFS is many times faster.

UPDATE 2017-01-31:
It appears that not only can you mount squashfs file, but also open it as a usual archive with familiar apps like File Roller on Linux and 7-Zip on Windows, etc.

So here is a command I use to back up my root folder:

sudo mksquashfs / /path/to/backup/hdd/root-backup.sqsh -e home media dev run mnt proc sys tmp

where "-e" switch excludes folders you want to exclude (like virtual and external Linux folders in my example).

After the backup is done, I can now mount it:

sudo mkdir /mnt/root_backup

sudo mount /path/to/backup/hdd/root-backup.sqsh /mnt/root_backup -t squashfs -o loop

Now just wait couple minutes (depending on size of the archive) and enjoy all your files at /mnt/root_backup folder.

Same can be done for /home/myname folder, e.g.

sudo mksquashfs /home/myname /path/to/backup/hdd/home-backup.sqsh -e Dropbox GoogleDrive

I exclude Dropbox and GoogleDrive here to avoid any potential problems in the future, in case I restore those folders from backup and they become messing with the actual files in the cloud.

Check more info at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/SquashFS-HOWTO/creatingandusing.html

We can also do backup of system with rsync & exclude files & folders that we don't want. Here is the following command to do this :

#rsync -aAXv --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found"} /* /path/to/backup/folder

Using the -aAX set of options, the files are transferred in archive mode, ensuring that symbolic links, devices, permissions and ownerships, modification times, ACLs and extended attributes are preserved

The --exclude option will cause files that match the given patterns to be excluded.

REFERENCE : Full system backup with rsync

Here is a good tutorial using PartImage.

go to ubuntu software center
find Déjà Dup backup manger
install it``
run it and give path where to backup your data
select files to be backup
make a back up

later on you can chose backup by giving location of your external hard drive
gud luck
source
[https://launchpad.net/deja-dup]

TimeShift.

TimeShift protects your system by taking incremental snapshots of the file system at regular intervals. These snapshots can be restored later to bring your system to the exact state it was in at the time when the snapshot was taken.

Open the terminal and run the following command

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

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install timeshift

Screenshots

Crashplan will back up all your system files and data and allow you to recover it - either on your current PC or allow you to adopt it to another install.

You can back up to their online system, another computer or any attached hard drive.

If you hard-disk where Ubuntu is installed isn't too big, you can try booting from a live cd (any linux distro will do) and running:

    dd if=/dev/sda of=/path/to/external/hardisk/mybackupfile

This makes a backup of your whole hard-disk, not just Ubuntu, and it'll also do all the empty bytes, but it's the only solution I can think of.
To restore the backup, use:

  dd if=/path/to/external/harddisk/mybackupfile of=/dev/sda

I have found you a detailed and recent how to on using Clonezilla. Clonezilla will let you make an image of your complete system including all hard drive partitions etc and later restore it.

The tutorial is at http://geekyprojects.com/cloning/how-to-use-clonezilla-tutorial/

You can use tools like Bacula Community or Bacula Enterprise.
The difference between them is that community version doesn't support bare metal restores when you don't need to re-install the system and just purely recover it after the major crash.

I use a program called Back In Time that's similar to Apple's Time Machine.

It's easy to tell it where you want your backups to go and how often to do the backup.

Back In Time is in the Ubuntu repos.