I have NOT gotten this to actually work. These are instructions I've pulled from various resources. I imagine they can be made to work, but I haven't figured it out yet.

I was trying all sorts of backup options on my system recently. I wanted to backup my entire system and restore it in a virtual machine. I looked at Ghost 4 Linux, Clonezilla, and others. For some reason, none of that stuff was working for me. Finally, I came across a thread that mentioned how to backup by simply tarring everything.

Here's the backup command.

tar cvpzf backup.tgz --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/backup.tgz --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys --exclude=/media --exclude=/backup /

There is also some mention from other users that you should exclude /dev and /sys. The original poster, however, mentions that there are problems with excluding those and including them doesn't seem to hurt.

Once you have your backup, here's how to restore it. Be careful, this overwrites all files on your hard drive with those in the backup.

tar xvpfz backup.tgz -C /

If you are restoring onto a different system or onto a virtual machine then Grub may have exploded. I found the Boot-Repair documentation helpful to restore my system from that state.

I probably should have excluded grub or some part of grub in order to prevent messing it up. My case was unique, however, because I was restoring to a different machine (a VM in my case).

I also excluded /home because I back it up separately.

One observation I made is that the gziped file was slightly larger than my hard drive. I actually expected it to be slightly smaller, since it's compressed. That was because I created the gzip file on a drive mounted in /media and I did not exclude /media when I did my backup. I've added that exclusion to the backup process now. Make sure you exclude the file or directory that you backup to.

You can also exclude the 'z' option and change the filename from '.tgz' to '.tar' to skip using gzip on the backup. Sometimes disk space is cheap. I tried it both ways and it actually seemed faster when I used gzip; probably because disk speed was my bottle neck. At first I thought this might help me, but it didn't.

There is also a great Ubuntu article about various ways to do the backup. Doing it across a network was particularly useful in my situation.

Here's the final command that I ran to create the backup. Your command will vary from this and it's here only as a reference.

sudo tar -cvpzf /media/FreeAgent\ Kay/backup.tgz --one-file-system --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/sys --exclude=/backup --exclude=/home / > ~/backup.log &

Instead of using tar and gzip you could copy all the files to a destination. This will leave them

sudo rsync -azv --progress --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/sys --exclude=/backup --exclude=/dev --exclude=/export --exclude=/media --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/tmp / /media/FreeAgent\ Kay/Backup/macubuntu/