Comments on: how to backup and restore from a complete reinstall?

By: The Open Sourcerer

The Open Sourcerer — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 15:22:40 +0000

Yep. This is another great example of the way Linux/Unix systems have been designed for multi-user systems from the ground-up.

Windows, on the other hand, spreads your data, personal settings and other pertinent stuff *all* over the hard disk. It’s a nightmare.

The FHS and LSB try to keep:

* all user’s settings in their respective home directories.
* all system settings in /etc
and keep binaries, libraries and log files in separate areas of the file system hierarchy too.

It makes maintenance easier and enables the administrator to design the system for their environment: You can mount or store any directory structure on separate partitions and even mount them across the LAN.

By: Adrian

Adrian — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:52:53 +0000

That sounds too good to be true. The easiest thing for me to do is now just backup my /home directory in full to an external HDD, and if I ever have to do a reinstall, then I can just copy it back and keep all my settings.

thanks Alan!

By: The Open Sourcerer

The Open Sourcerer — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:28:27 +0000

Hi Adrian,

the simplest way to deal with most of this is to put the /home area on a different partition of your hard disk. When you install Ubuntu, select the manual partition option. The general principles that work for most are something like this:

first partition: (sda1 or hda1) is for your root partition. Make it about 10-15G and you will have loads of space.

Next create a partition (ideally at the end of the disk) for your swap area and that is normally made to be about twice the size of the RAM.

Then allocate the rest of the disk to /home.

If you have “lots” of capacity, it is also nice to have a spare partition where you can install a different OS.

This has several benefits:

1. /home can be backed up independently of the OS and can even be mounted on a different machine if you wish (NFS).
2. When you do a new install of the OS (or if you want to try Mandriva or Fedora etc…) you can mount /home during the install and *all* your settings:GUI look and feel, mail boxes, passwords, etc will be retained. This assumes you don’t blindly click past the “use the whole disk” option during the new install. Just be sure to take care.