How would I use tar for full backup and restore with system on SSD and home on HDD?

Solution 1:

It is adviced to make TWO backups. 1 for / and 1 for /home if they are on different partition. If you want one you will have to add a lot of exceptions to that one command. Example:

sudo su
cd /
tar -cvpzf backup.tar.gz --exclude=/backup.tar.gz --one-file-system / 
tar -cvpzf backuphome.tar.gz --one-file-system /home/

will backup your root and exclude ALL mounted partitions, like /media (you do not want to backup external devices (you really do not)) and you absolutely do NOT want to backup something like /dev or /proc. And /home goes to another backup.

In above method the backup are stored in /. It will be bettter to store it on an external media; you can then put a directory in front of the backup.tar.gz and drop the --exclude=... from the 1st command.

• backup.tar.gz is the backup.
• The --exclude will prevent the actual backup to be backupped.

• cvpzf: create, verbose, preserve permissions, compress, use a file.

• --one-file-system - Do not include files on a different filesystem. If you want other filesystems, such as a /home partition, or external media mounted in /media backed up, you either need to back them up separately, or omit this flag. If you do omit this flag, you will need to add several more --exclude= arguments to avoid filesystems you do not want. These would be /proc, /sys, /mnt, /media, /run and /dev directories in root. /proc and /sys are virtual filesystems that provide windows into variables of the running kernel, so you do not want to try and backup or restore them. /dev is a tmpfs whose contents are created and deleted dynamically by udev, so you also do not want to backup or restore it. Likewise, /run is a tmpfs that holds variables about the running system that do not need backed up (Source).

So ... if you really still want a "one-liner" it could look like this:

cd /
tar -cvpzf backup.tar.gz --exclude=/backup.tar.gz --exclude=/proc 
--exclude=/tmp --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/dev --exclude=/sys / 

(I hope I got all of what needs to be excluded)

Restoring would be

sudo su
cd /
tar xvzf backup.tar.gz

I did not use sudo in front of the tar command since you will get error messages regarding permissions (because of files owned by root).