Backing up and restoring your system using Systemback
Snapshot
© Lead Image © scyther5, 123RF.com
At the push of a button, Systemback backs up or clones the complete current system and can restore it as required.
Windows provides extremely useful recovery points. At the push of a button, the operating system backs up the whole system in its current state. You can restore this backup later and thus return to the old state. This feature is particularly useful if newly installed software goes haywire or if you accidentally trash the configuration. Until now, such a function has been missing in Linux. To back up the system, you either had to use a backup program or had to back up the whole partition with a Live system, such as Clonezilla [1], which is fairly awkward.
The tool Systemback brings this recovery feature to Linux. Systemback backs up the current system and restore it as needed (see the "Warning" box). Systemback also offers the possibility of copying the current system, or one of the backups, to another data storage device; this is particularly useful if you want to migrate the system to a new computer.
As a bonus, Systemback creates a Live system on the computer that can be written to a USB flash drive or a DVD. Finally, the tool also handles updates and will try to repair a faulty system. Systemback has one small drawback, however: Currently it only runs on Debian "Jessie" and on Ubuntu and its derivatives, such as Linux Mint 17.
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