How do I back up a Linux PC?

[ztirffritz]

I've been looking for some info on this, but I haven't found anything that is really useful. Is there nothing equivalent to Carbon Copy Cloner available for Linux?

[Seacrest]

man rsync

Really, what did you think CCC is?
It is just a GUI (pretty good) wrapper around some command line tools.

[ztirffritz]

I've tried using rsync, but it blows up all over the place. Is there nothing like CCC for Linux? Half the stuff on the man pages for RSYNC contradicts the other half. I just want to clone an entire Linux installation to an external USB drive. This seems like it shouldn't be that difficult of a task, but everything that I read says that one method is better than another. I want to make a disk that has everything that the original had, then, when/if I hose the original I can reinstall Ubuntu and just copy over the old image and restore it to where it was. In theory, RSYNC should be the way to go, but it never seems to work. Also, RSYNC says that it is only for network backup.

[Seacrest]

It's Linux.
If it were easy, it'd be OS X.

[ztirffritz]

OK, I tried this
sudo rsync -avvz / /media/USBdrive/

seems to be working, but it has just occured to me, what will rsync do when it hits /media/USBdrive/? Will it just keep copying until it runs out of space, like a digital version of an Escher drawing?

[ztirffritz]

I thought that would just backup the Linux root directory (and everything in it) but it is backing up the entire hard drive. I've got sooooo much to learn still.

[TheCaber]

Well, you certainly learned about recursion!

The nature of the UNIX filesystem is that / is the root. Backing that up and everything on it implies that the entire hard drive (and all partitions) will be backed up.

If you are backing up to the same machine, you might want to read the 'tar' man page. Tar will capture all the information needed to recreate a directory and its contents exactly as found. It also takes options that allow you to exclude certain directories ( /dev/ , /Volumes/ , /automount/ , /Network/ and /.vol/ all come to mind as do-not-copy candidates ), restrict archiving to a single volume, and allows you to specify where the tar output goes--to a file or a pipe.

MacOS X tar is the GNU tar, and should be from the same code base as Linux' tar.