On 2016-10-03 18:33, Jeffrey L. Taylor wrote:
I am planning on a clean install (going from 13.1 to 42.2 Beta) on the root partition, leaving the home partition alone. I'm not doing complete backups because of limited space on the backup drive. I've room for a single full backup, both partitions. What is a reliable way?
"cp -a / /media/LinuxBackup/full" is what occurs to me. Is there a better way?
Two main methods: 1) image full disk backup, good for fast restore from scratch. I would perhaps use clonezilla for this. 2) file by file backup. I would use rsync for this. Or, if the device is xfs, there are specific xfs backup/restore tools. I prefer to use 1 and 2 for the system, and 2 for data. Yes, both. The paranoid in me wins. I would not use tar.gz archives. I do not trust them. Reason: a few (or one) byte error makes the tar unrecoverable. I would prefer a method like rar, that stores recovery data that allow to recover the archive in case of media errors - but rar does not support all linux filesystem attributes, so it is out. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" at Telcontar)