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How to Backup and Restore your Home directory
January 10, 2010 File System, Upgrading
9 Votes
If you dont keep your data separate from your operating system, i.e. on another
volume, then when you distro hop you need to be able to backup you Home folder
before you install your new OS. This is the problem Ive recently faced when moving
from XFCE based Xubuntu to CrunchBang.
If you have a second hard disk (internal or external) then this is relatively easy,
alternatively assuming you have space you cold use Gparted to create an additional
partition on your hard drive and use this, although as it is all on the same physical
disk it is more risky and therefore not my preference.
Whilst you can use rsync, TAR is the traditional way of backing up in Linux / Unix /
MAC OSX and ships as standard with all Linux distros.
For my purposes I have used the rather helpful instructions on Ubuntu forums
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-93193.html provided by James
Fryman. Although dated, they still work. Ive distilled the forum post below
To Backup
In terminal type:
tar cf <name of archive>.tar.gz /home/<username>
In addition, when doing a tar backup, its also good to add the following flags : p &
(z/j)
-p will preserve the original file permissions
-z will compress using gzip (medium cpu usage, but less space)
-j will compress using bzip2 (lots of cpu, even less space)
-v verbose output (optional)
So, a full backup would look something like this:
tar c(z/j)vf <name of archive>.tar.gz /home/<username>
In place of the .gz file name extension you could also use bz2.
For more info on tar command parameters, from Terminal enterman tar.
To Extract (restore the backup)
In terminal type:
tar x(z/j)vf <name of archive>.tar.gz
In place of the .gz file name extension you could also use bz2.
A Real Example
To backup my home directory to a tar file located in the root of a second hard disk I
did the following:
a. Find out what disks and partitions exist:
sudo fdisk -l
This will display something similar to the screen-shot below
Change to the media directory
cd /media
b. Make a directory called disk1
sudo mkdir disk1
c. Mount my second hard disk (SDB1) to the disk1 directory
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/disk
d. Change to the mounted disk
cd disk1
e. Enter the following to backup the home directory called myhomedirectory to a
TAR file called mybackup.tar.gz:
tar czvf mybackup.tar.gz /home/myhomedirectory
this creates a file called mybackup.tar.gz in the /media/disk1 directory which is a
backup of the home directory called myhomedirectory.
To restore, all I did under Crunchbang was to mount the second disk (as above) and
from my Home directory enter:
tar xzvf mybackup.tar.gz
This restores the contents of the tar file into the root of my home directory. It
includes the folder structure from root, but that is fine as it then allows me to copy
over what I need for my new distro. I can then delete what is not needed.
Furthermore, file permissions are maintained.
For more information on the tar file format go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_%28file_format%29
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4 thoughts on How to Backup and Restore your
Home directory
pete the plumber
February 10, 2015 at 02:46
Awesome source of info buddy. Love the time you spent.
Reply
Carl
March 3, 2015 at 12:42
Very good description. I too moved to #! and just run it on an external USB chip. Its
perfect.
In terms of backup, I use REDO (found here- http://redobackup.org/)
Its so easy to use and avoids the dread and complexities of using Clonezilla.
Reply
Pingback: Backup helpful tips | Polikin's Blog
Just me
November 18, 2017 at 13:36
Hey dude, thanks for this, you literally saved my home folder from my mistakes
Reply
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