Created a tar.gz inside when booted up into a USB Xubuntu.
sudo tar -cvpzf fresh-ubuntu-server.tar.gz --one-file-system /media/xubuntu/cea0fa37-84bc-4edb-8ce1-0fac03b717db/
To restore the system to this archive, you want to reformat the system partition. Unmount the /media.
Figure out which /dev/sda* is the system partition:
sudo parted /dev/sda print
Model: ATA Samsung SSD 850 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 250GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1049kB 538MB 537MB fat32 boot
2 538MB 20.5GB 20.0GB ext4 system
4 20.5GB 242GB 221GB ext4 data
3 242GB 250GB 8506MB linux-swap(v1) swap
For us it is /dev/sda2.
Also, df -h helps us figure out what is currently mounted.
xubuntu@xubuntu:/dev$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/cow 3.9G 63M 3.8G 2% /
udev 3.9G 4.0K 3.9G 1% /dev
tmpfs 791M 1.4M 790M 1% /run
/dev/sdb 949M 949M 0 100% /cdrom
/dev/loop0 908M 908M 0 100% /rofs
none 4.0K 0 4.0K 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 3.9G 8.0K 3.9G 1% /tmp
none 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
none 3.9G 80K 3.9G 1% /run/shm
none 100M 24K 100M 1% /run/user
/dev/sda2 19G 1.5G 16G 9% /media/xubuntu/cea0fa37-84bc-4edb-8ce1-0fac03b717db
Reformat /dev/sda2.
sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sda2
Now, we want to uncompress our archive into this fresh partition:
cd /media/xubuntu/7bb41b72-c321-4a32-bbe9-c97364a5d43e/backups
sudo tar -xvpzf ./fresh-ubuntu-server.tar.gz -C /media/xubuntu/7c7179f0-a405-443a-bead-42133690b716/ --numeric-owner