It moves! Live Linux backups with Remastersys

About backup, you can talk a lot and with taste, but I will not play Captain Obvious. The first links in the issue of Google on the request "Ubuntu backup" tell about rsync, partimage, fsarchiver, dd, tar, simple backup. I spent many hours experimenting with these tools and reinstalling the system after unsuccessful experiments. I wanted to find the fastest and easiest way to restore the system after a fatal crash and continue to work, as if nothing had happened. The text under the cut would save me a total of a couple of working days, I read it a few months ago when I first installed Ubuntu on a working laptop.

Remastersys is a script that creates a LiveCD from an installed system. With all the settings and installed packages. If the system is not suddenly loaded or hopelessly corrupted by your crooked hands, and you need to work urgently, there is no faster way. Just insert the flash drive and reboot. Then you pull out your current work from Dropbox (or wherever you have it) and you're done. Later you can install the system from this flash drive.

How to cook it?

1. After the system is set up and all the necessary programs are installed, we do a general cleaning to bring the image to the minimum. Uninstall everything unnecessary, then sudo apt-get autoremove and sudo apt-get clean, clean the cart and see what we get in the disk usage analyzer. Remastersys assumes an image size of no more than 4 GB, so, taking into account archiving, it is unlikely that we can cram more than 6G into our LiveCD. And here it is better to perebydet than to come short - remastersys is not different in intelligence and ingenuity and does not warn that the size of the image is too large, but simply crashes with an error in the middle of the process.
2. We bring in remastersys exceptions like this: /home/USERNAME/.cache /home/USERNAME/.thumbnails /home/USERNAME/.local/share/Trash / var / cache. This can be done in the /etc/remastersys.conf file or via the GUI. If you have a lot of video, music, or other heavy files - exclude the folders in which they lie. Backup large volumes is beyond the scope of this article. Dropbox may behave strangely - although it picks up the restored folder, it can wipe files on the server that are not on the LiveCD, so you have to manually restore them via the web interface. Of course, it would be possible to exclude his folder, but if you make a backup regularly, the version on the LiveCD will differ little from the current one, and it will be faster with your hands to right up Dropbox brains than to download the entire folder. However, maybe you will not have such a glitch.
3. We start the process and wait for a long time.
4. System → Administration → Creating a bootable disk. Choose our iso, fill it with a flash drive.
5. sudo remastersys clean

After booting from the flash drive, I had to restart WiFi manually - 5 seconds. In addition, proprietary video card drivers do not work with the LiveCD.
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ATTENTION!
Linux administration is not in my remit. I do this out of necessity. Therefore, I did not touch on many other aspects of working with Remastersys - modifying the boot menu, for example. I also did not test the resulting flash drive on many different computers - whether it boots, installs ... It all worked right away for me - which means that many others (though not necessarily all, alas) should. More detailed instructions are on the website remastersys .