I have backed up my whole system, Linux mint 16 64 bit, to a thumb drive with Grsync , my question is , if my system collapses how do I get the copy off of the thumb drive back onto the hard drive(how do I restore my system

http://www.evbackup.com/support-rest...es-with-rsync/

Apparently Grsync is a graphical interface (GUI) to rsync. If you wanted to use the GUI to restore you would probably need a bootable disk (usb or cd\dvd) that had Grsync on it.

I've used dd to copy and restore a system before. I have not used rsync for that purpose as I understood that wasn't its purpose. I was under the impression rsync was to make mirrors (backup copies) of the files you select, can't say if it would do a whole system. I never tried. I am not sure if it would result in a bootable system. I guess the only way to find out would be to grab a spare, blank, (no partition) hard drive and try from scratch. You will still need a bootable disk of some kind to give the rsync command.

I HEARTILY congratulate you for forward thinking in testing your "backup". Don't stop now, make sure, ABSOLUTELY sure it works.

Kevin

To extend buttugly post, I case other methods don't work, you can always use cp (just don't forget -a flag; see manual). I'm not sure about GRsync, but you'll find rsync on almost every Live distro (if not, try system repair/recovery distro).

Essentially, "rsync" in its various forms is to: "synchronize 'this' with 'that,'" where both 'this' and 'that' can be either on a local system or a remote one.

Through some remarkably clever algorithms, rsync figures out what to do, assesses the situation, then most-efficiently carries out the task.