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I am new to linux, and have been installing ubuntu again and again because I mess up something while trying different set-ups. I would like to have an incremental snapshot of my system so that I can revert to what I had when I made the backup.

Can I achieve what I want using either Deja-dup or Back in Time? and if so, what directories do I need to back up?

I have seen posts that say that backing up the /home directory is enough, but it has failed me once, and I don't see how that works. Does it store all my settings & apps, things like shellscripts I add to the /bin directory(am I even supposed to do that?), or changes i make when i edit stuff like /etc/sysctl.conf?

Sorry for my poor English, what I basically want is this How to make a disk image and restore from it later? except I don't use Wubi. I am wondering if hard links or lvm's can save my disk space & time. I do a lot of swiching languages back and forth, and it almost never goes back to what I originally had, especially input method.

As both a new linux user and a non-english speaker, any suggestions for terms I can use to google would also help me alot. Thank you.

(I tried lvm snapshots following instructions on askubuntu, and failed. I would like to learn what I did wrong in the future, but it seems that it is not intended for keeping multiple snapshots, so this is probably not a choice for me at the moment right?)

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haruno
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1 Answers1

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Installing applications should never do harm to your system when dependencies can be solved. If that was not the case then we should consider this a bug of the respective application.

This may not be so clear if we wanted to play with unstable pre-release versions, or if we need to remove an application and it's dependency again, as we may not be able to foresee unwanted side-effects. In addition in case we are not very organized we may forget about an application we had installed but never used. This usually is not an issue as applications only need little space on our system.

More serious are issues from changing values of system-wide configuration files, as these may not be reset so easily.

To avoid having my main productive system cluttered with many applications I don't really need, or ending up with an unstable system on installing alpha or beta versions of applications I do all this testing in a virtual machine:

By this we can easily revert back to an earlier snapshot, or to our vanilla backup installation. We can isolate a single new application installed in a vanilla installation, and we can also test various release or flavours of Ubuntu from a virtual machine.

The only drawback of a VM is the somewhat slower performance, some hard-drive usage, and rare bugs of the virtualization software we can not tell apart from real bugs of an application.

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Takkat
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