There are many, many different ways to back up your Ubuntu system. Here we’re going to look at two of them, one of which is a full system backup and the other is a way to copy folders and files. The point of this article isn’t to be super inclusive of every method under the sun, but to provide a guide as to how I do this and why it works for me.

All of my backups are done to an external drive. In my case, this is a firewire drive that is mounted in my /media directory. There’s nothing stoping you form doing this to a network drive, a seperate partition or even your primary partition. However, you do have to be cautious of your space limitations. Backing up a 3 GB install onto a 40 GB disk is fine, but backing up 63GB of data to your 80GB drive… not so good. This is one of the two reasons I use an external 200 GB drive. Lots of space. The other reason is that moving a backup file off of my primary partition after I’m done backing it up just seems like an extra step.

There are two types of backups that I do. The first is a backup of several key folders, not my entire system. This is in case I blow something away, or lose some data that I’d want to get back quickly.

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