Backup for Redeployment

Before a system is redeployed, we should temporarily back up any existing user data since the installation process erases the full disk.

Use a Live USB Live USB to unlock and mount the relevant volume(s). Using the Terminal, you will need to create mount points for each volume you want to backup and for your backup destination:

sudo mkdir /mnt/volume1

sudo mkdir /mnt/volume2

sudo mkdir /mnt/backup

To void permissions issues while backing up, you'll want to use sudo or carefully act as the root user.

Use rsync to backup

rsync is the preferred way to do backups because it preserves all file permissions, modified/access times, and other metadata.

Here's an example rsync command to backup /home to /mnt/backup

sudo rsync -avh --progress /mnt/volume1 /mnt/backup/

Note the source part of that command does not have a 'trailing slash' on the path, but the destination command does. This is important. Those trailing slashes change how rsync stores data on the destination. The example command above should automatically create /mnt/backup/volume1 and store all the data inside that directory. If you skip the training slash on the destination path, rsync would store the data directly in /mnt/backup. If you're backing up more than one volume, this will mix all the data together and make it difficult to sort out when you go to restore it.

Use rsync to restore

Restoring data on the new system is simply the reverse of the backup:

sudo rsync -avh --progress /mnt/backup/volume1/ /path/to/volume1/

Notice how this command has 'trailing slashes' on both source and destination. Since /path/to/volume1 already exists, rsync will take everything in /mnt/backup/volume1 and put it inside /path/to/volume1.

Use the Nautilus GUI to drag-and-drop

To use the GUI Nautilus file manager to do a drag-and-drop copies of files where preserving metadata is not important, use the following command to open a window with root access:

sudo nautilus