Which directories should be excluded when backing up the root directory using ubuntu? [duplicate]
Solution 1:
When I rsync
my system to a backup partition, I exclude these:
--exclude=/dev/* \
--exclude=/home/*/.gvfs \
--exclude=/home/*/.mozilla/firefox/*/Cache \
--exclude=/home/*/.cache/chromium \
--exclude=/home/*/.thumbnails \
--exclude=/media/* \
--exclude=/mnt/* \
--exclude=/proc/* \
--exclude=/sys/* \
--exclude=/tmp/* \
--exclude=/home/*/.local/share/Trash \
--exclude=/etc/fstab \
--exclude=/var/run/* \
--exclude=/var/lock/* \
--exclude=/lib/modules/*/volatile/.mounted \
--exclude=/var/cache/apt/archives/* \
This way I am able to boot into the backup partition the same way I can boot to the original one.
So to sum up, I would suggest
not excluding
/{dev,proc,media,...}
themselves, just their contentsexcluding
/var/{run,lock}
, and especially the big/var/cache/apt/archives/
Solution 2:
I'll recomend to exclude all /usr
(except fort /usr/local/
) and have a backup of dpkg --get-selections
In my opinion a Full backup isn't really usefull. I rather prefer backup data and preferences and then restore packages from the official repositories.
But is my preference...
/usr
contains mainly static binary content from distribution packages. Reinstalling a package will restore /usr
contents. Also /bin
and /sbin
contains binaries from distribution packages.
/usr/local
contains manually installed packages (out of distribuition packages). so this is worth to backup.
Solution 3:
I also read all of the answers and all the other related questions when I was configuring my full system backup.
My 2 cents would be not to exclude anything but only when you are doing a full system backup of an offline system.
Let me elaborate now: If you backing up the system from within itself, then you may exclude some directories as others have mentioned but this is not a good way in my opinion as it can introduce some bugs later on when restoring the system. For example, if you exclude /tmp directory, then after restoring it, /tmp won't be there and system will create one and this can have stuck login screens due to chmod & chown issues on /tmp. Also not backing up ~/.cache directory can result in breaking up database cache of Ubuntu Software Centre.
What I do is use a live CD and use LuckyBackup and backup the entire system without omitting anything. Now when restoring, I chose 'delete files not present in the source'. This way you will have an entire system snapshot restored exactly to the state when you created the backup (kinda like snapshotting a VM).