borked my ubuntu 15.04 upgrade, had to punt

[slag]

Was using ubuntu 15.04 and decided to upgrade to 15.10. Well, it hung partway through the process and wouldn't finish. I was able to boot into recovery mode, but never into "normal" mode. I booted to recovery mode and attempted to upgrade the kernel to 4.3. Things went from bad to worse where it wouldn't even boot to recovery mode after that and after a day of trying to troubleshoot the problem, finally punted and 2 hours later had 15.10 with kernel 4.2 installed. It's pretty snappy, still has some issues with the intel NUC, but once it boots up, works great.

Trial by fire..

What's the best way to backup and restore my 60 GB hard drive with ubuntu on it to an external drive. Will a simple tarball suffice or is there something better?

 

[jae]

Does Ubuntu have the Disks program? You could use that.

 

[slag]

Does Ubuntu have the Disks program? You could use that.

I'm using ubuntu server.. not sure, will check when I get home.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Trial by fire..

What's the best way to backup and restore my 60 GB hard drive with ubuntu on it to an external drive. Will a simple tarball suffice or is there something better?

dd or partclone should do the trick to image the drive as long as the filesystem isn't mounted.

 

[lxskllr]

I'd strongly suggest sticking with the lts releases, especially on a server. There's still no guarantees, but I've found upgrades are more reliable. Interim releases are geared more for testing, and aren't ideal for production machines.

 

[Fallen Kell]

I would suggest partimage as well as backing up things like lvm config (vgcfgbackup), save output from pvdisplay to a file, and partition layout backup (sgdisk or sfdisk depending on GTP or not).