Restoration script for full linux backup

Prepare for backups

Before you'll be able to restore your system from backup, you have to do backups.

Get an USB thumb drive or external HDD big enough to hold entire content of our notebook's SSD.
Install gparted-live into beginning of this disk
Format rest of this disk (gparted would take no more than half of GB at the beginning) as ext4 system
Install rsnapshot on your machine and set up it to make backup into
```
/media/${your name}/${label of your USB partition}/${hostname}
```
Or whereever your desktop enviroment mountes removable disks.

If you have big usb HDD and several notebooks, you can backup all of them on one medium. You should backup everything including /boot/efi, although you can omit mozilla cache and other thinks which are likely to change during backup.
Do first backup. Do:
```
echo p |fdisk /dev/nvme0n1 > partitions.layout  
```
copy restore script into root of your backup partition.

Do backup regularly

Don't forget to insert this USB drive into your notebook and run rsnapshot with appropriate argument as root on regular basis.

Use alpha/beta/gamma modes of rsnapshot, so you'll store daily backups for last week, weekly ones for last month and several monthly ones.

Since backup to external drive requires human intervention anyway (pick drive from drawer and plug it into computer, and then return back), I don't expect myself to do backups every day. Why should I backup a notebook I haven't switched on since last backup?

This set of scripts includes some scripts which simplify semiregular backups on removable drive.

backup - perl script which checks if there are enough backups on level alpha done and it's time to do next level beta backup. It reads /etc/rsnapshot.conf for snapshot_root and retain parameters. After successful backup it unmounts backup drive.
aftermount - this script inteneded to be run by automounting system in your desktop session (tested with spacewm). It runs after removable disk is mounted and checks if this disk contains snapshot_root. If so, it displays dialog window asking you if you want to run backup. If yes, it starts backup using sudo.
backup.sudo - place this file into /etc/sudoers.d so aftermount would be able to run backup as root without password.

Restore old files occasionaly

Sometimes you'll find out that you have incedently removed or modified some file. You can than plug your backup drive in and get yesterday's or week ago copy.

That is why aftermount script displays dialog requiring you to confirm start of backup. You may want to plug backup drive in just to dig out some files.

When disaster happens

When your SSD drive dies, or have been irrepairable wiped out, or hit by trojan or cryptolocker so it is easier to wipe out then do anything else:

Repair the hardware
Insert your backup drive in USB port and boot from it. Mount your second partition under, say /mnt
From parted-live GUI create necessary partitions. You can consult partitions.layout file which you have created while preparing backup. Don't forget create vfat partition for /boot/efi, if you are using UEFI boot.
Mount newly created root partition under, say /target and if you use separate partitions for /home, /var or anything else, mount them on /target/home, /target/var etc. Don't forget to mount /target/boot/efi
Cd to /mnt and run
```
restore /target
```
IF you keep backup for several compiters on one disk or want to restore not the latest daily backup, specify backup directory
```
restore mynote/beta.1 /target
```
Reboot and enjoy.

Other uses

You can use this restoration procedure when you are upgrading your main SSD - no need to search for USB SATA or USB NVME controller to copy data from old disk. That is why we don't create partitions from script. User may want to rearrange partition layout or just restore system on bigger drive.