[How-to] System Backup & Restore

Simple tutorial - how to backup and restore OS in case something bad happens, so that you can sleep well.

With this solution, there is no downtime (when backing up). It is not a byte-to-byte backup, yet it can be used as one (with a few steps) as well.

There are multiple diff-based utilities out there.

I can recommend Duplicati which offers:

  • Nice GUI
  • Cloud support
  • Encryption (AES/GPG)

If you don’t want to pay your hosting provider additional costs for sector-by-sector backups - you can give Duplicati a shot & upload your encrypted backup to one of many Storage Providers.

You can use the following folder filter to backup root except these virtual file systems:
-/dev/
-/lost+found/
-/media/
-/mnt/
-/proc/
-/run/
-/sys/
-/tmp/

Duplicati works well even on VPS. With numerous cloud providers support - it is enough to find one which offers at least the same disk size and you are good to go.

In case of any disaster, one can easily install previous OS (proper version) and restore OS backup followed by this guide or burning this iso.

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