How to backing up Ubuntu server and restoring to another Ubuntu instance
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 -i cd /
tar -cvpzf backup.tar.gz --exclude=/backup.tar.gz --one-file-system / tar -cvpzf backuphome.tar.gz --one-file-system /home/
For anyone not familiar with backup up Ubuntu server in terminal here is a little more information. To get the best backup without failing due to permissions you want 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`. Then `/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 getting backed-up.
Alternative is backing up just the root project folder like www public_html `tar -czvf my_directory.tar.gz my_directory'
mysqldump -u root -p --all-databases > all_dbs.sql
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 extermedia mounted in /media backed up, you either need to back them up separately, or omit this flag. If you do omit tflag, you will need to add several more --exclude= arguments to avoid filesystems you do not want. These would/proc, /sys, /mnt, /media, /run and /dev directories in root. /proc and /sys are virtual filesystems that provwindows into variables of the running kernel, so you do not want to try and backup or restore them. /dev is a tmwhose contents are created and deleted dynamically by udev, so you also do not want to backup or restore it. Likewi/run is a tmpfs that holds variables about the running system that do not need.
cd /
tar -cvpzf backup.tar.gz --exclude=/backup.tar.gz --exclude=/proc --exclude=/tmp --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/dev --exclude=/sys /
Simply use the scp command on the Mac, like this: scp username@192.168.1.111/backup.tar.gz /local/path/to/myfile.txt. You may also just use FileZilla which is a graphical client. Connect to your Ubuntu with a URL like sftp://192.168.1.111, of course you need to use the valid IP address.
scp username@192.168.1.111/backup.tar.gz /MAC/Users/home/Sites/Backups/P/Pienode.com/backup.tar.gz
cd /
tar -cvpzf backup.tar.gz --exclude=/backup.tar.gz --exclude=/proc
--exclude=/tmp --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/dev --exclude=/sys /
mysql -u root -p < all_dbs.sql
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).