Kodi Community Forum

Just wondering if anyone else backs-up their ubuntu/linux xbmc installation?

Twice i think i've rebuilt my system from scratch due to playing about with it trying to upgrade this and that or trying to get something else working. Not a massive task in itself but still a pain.

After a little google-fu i found SystemImager which runs as a server-client situation and takes an image of a system while its booted and its drives still mounted all over the network.

I followed this guide to do it and just installed ubuntu 8.10 in vmware on my windows pc to take the images.

To restore a system or duplicate it to another just make a boot cd by giving systemimager some paramaters and boot with it, it can also do differential updates to the images your images.

Now i don't mind playing about with my install as a fresh install is only 15 mins away.

I use seperate partitions so a bad upgrade would be more annoying then anything. I am fine unless the harddrive crashes.

Nah, I just use it as a HTPC. If you're running linux on the desktop, you should backup your home directory and list of installed packages, though.

I do an Acronis image occasionally, good for a fallback for when I do dumb things like type a command wrong and blast the first gig of my partition instead of formatting the USB as a patchstick. <ahem> I'd like a better more automated way of doing it that would be space conservative and my unRAID servers do run a stripped Linux but I've not investigated it yet.... Having a go-back is a good idea even if yuo only do it occasionally. Building from SVN is NOT hard but loading up the OS and tweaking for things like say the remote, the LCD, the video, and the audio can be a hassle!

I use "rsync -av /home/my --delete /mnt/backup"
No special software needed.

On my HTPC (XBMC) system, I backed up /etc and /home once everything was configured the right way (e.g. remote, pm-utils). If for some reason the random HDD I installed fails, I can just plop those two directories back in place and have a workable system. It would get me back to 98% the same configuration I have now; it would just require adding and removing some packages, not much else. If you're making tweaks to files outside of /etc or /home, you're probably doing something wrong. ;-)