Rubin Shrestha
Rubin Shrestha
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doing a backup of the entire home-folder of my notebook – rsync, tar,

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what is aimed: since i am currently working on the backup of a  notebook: i only need ot backup a certain amount of data: not the whole systen. So this has to be mentioned here: again – well all i

doing a backup of the entire home-folder of my notebook – rsync, tar, – which methods, means are the best?

i want to archive is to copy just everything from my home directory to an external drive

Including the following data:

  • hidden files

  • documents

  • browser bookmarks and profiles

  • application settings

to say what is needed: important first thoughts: i do not want to copy the entire filesystem (/) no not: — that said i think that this will cause severe and serious permissions problems, So to spell it out clearly: system files are not needed, and it risks copying mounted system paths.
What i need is the entire user’s home directory, because all personal data that i am interested are inside /home/<username>
that said: all hidden files ( guess that all that stuff is quite starting with the following “sign” .) are probably included there ( as i think herein are the following datasets: browser profiles, app configs, SSH keys, etc.)

hmm do i really need system-level settings, well i can back up only specific directories.
the main goal i want to achieve is just to copy all stuff and everything from my home directory to an external drive
hmm – i guess that this can be done safely and fully with one command in terminal.
that said: i think that this can be done safely and fully with one so calles “onliner command”.

the question is: hmm what is the cleanest possible method to back up everything in my home directory (including all hidden files) before reinstalling.

some preliminary assumptions on the process – ideas how to start this:

To backup the Entire Home Directory (where everything i need is included) – i think i have to make sure my external drive is mounted – Afaik – usually it appears somewhere like:

/media/<myusername>/<drive-label>/

i think that we can verify with:

 bash ls /media ls /media/<myusername>/

update after doing some research i found out. – there are some command that support me here – and that help out.. tar and rsync – perhaps these two procedures help here:

well regarding **tar:

tar** packs all the files into a one tiny single file “archive, ” which can then be compressed to save space – ant a tar file that can be very handy and easy to port over.

…… regarding the rsync:

afaik the rsync will copy exact files, and besides that it can speed up by only copying what has changed – thats pretty very smart and clever. so i thnk that the concrete commands then would look like so:

tar -cJpf /media/<the concrete username>/bkup.tar.xz /home/<username>

rsync -aHAX --progress /home/<the concrete username>/ /media/<username>//

but well – a good solution could be to do this with rsync

rsync -rtv source_folder/ destination_folder/

    r for recursive copying of directories
    t for preserving modification times
    v for increased verbosity

well can i do this so:
…. any ideas!?

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