System Backups
 

Hi

I've just gone through a bit of pain with Linux. I had Fedora Core 8 installed and thought I'd try Kubuntu as well - however, it crashed when it got to updating GRUB, meaning my entire Linux partition was unaccessible (I could still boot into Windows XP).

I've now installed Fedora 8 64-bit and have got my settings more or less as I like them, plus I have got my e-mail reconfigured and repopulated with my saved messages.

I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS AGAIN!!!!

Is there a back-up utility which, in the event of a major systems crash, would let me re-install the OS and then overlay all my settings, preferences, documents etc in an easier way than the piecemeal approach I have just now?

Hope someone can help - I'm quite new to Linux.

Yeah, there are a bunch of backup software projects that do just that. Just do a search, and you'll see..there are both commercial and non-commercial ones, and you can write your own little backup script using the usual Linux/Unix tools if you wish.

Though reinstalling an operating system is a bit of an overkill if your bootloader gets corrupt (by the way: how could you access Windows, if the bootloader was trashed? or was it just the bootloader configuration that didn't work for your Linux operating systems, and in that case are you sure it was just the bootloader configuration and not for example you having overwritten either OS?). You could just reinstall the bootloader, which takes something like a second or so :) And then reconfigure it - there are some scripts that do this automatically, or you can just add the entries yourself, copy-pasting and modifying each one a little.

At least Fedora used to offer a "rescue disc" from which you could boot and reinstall Grub with two commands (root and setup) and have it work. And if you don't have it, it's ok, because you can use pretty much any Linux live-cd (like Ubuntu or Kubuntu desktop disc, Fedora live-cd, Knoppix, ...) to boot, mount your harddisk partitions, enter a chroot environment and re-run the Grub installation commands (or Lilo, if you use that).

As an addition: to backup your personal data, simply backup (copy, preserving permissions and what you like) your home directory (/home/username). To backup system configuration, copy the configuration files you want to preserve. Programs you can always get from the web, and if your package manager can import/export a list of packages installed/to be installed, you can deal with that easily too - export a installed-packages list of a working system, and after reinstallation import it to the package manager asking it to install everything in the list that is not installed already.