Backing Up Ubuntu
A backup is completely useless unless you can effectively restore your system or data. Before we backed up our entire Ubuntu system so with a few easy steps we will now restore it. It should be noted that we could have simply backed up a few important files and then restored our OS data by reinstalling Ubuntu from a downloaded image, and finally restore our selected files into a directory of our choosing.
Be sure to be very careful at this point. The restoration which we will be going through will overwrite the entire Ubuntu file system, thus restoring the older image that we took.
1) Open the terminal.
2) sudo su
3) cd /
Move to the root directory.
3a) A copy of the backup should exist in the root directory. If not, you can copy it here.
4) tar xvpfz mybackup.tgz -C /
Now, using the tar tool we will perform the restoration using the verbose, retain permissions, (un)zip, and, most importantly, the extract options. This will take a while because all your files will be overwritten with the versions from the image you previously backed up. The "-C /" in the remainder ensures that the file is restore to the root directory. This is useful if your backup file was not moved to the root file, as said in 3a, but instead is on a DVD.
5) mkdir proc
mkdir lost+found
and so on... In this step all the directories which were excluded from the back up must be remade.
6) Reboot the system
This method for backing up Ubuntu is one of the simplest and fastest available. It does take some customizing and tweaking to work for everyone's needs but it is powerful, versatile, and free. This method is not totally perfect though, users should note that it only overwrites files, it does not deleted files from the old version which are no longer needed. This method is available in slightly tweaked versions all over, but this is the one which has worked best for me, time and again.
Whether you use this method or another, it is important to back up your files. Data protection should be something which anyone with information that they value needs to take seriously.