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  • Thanks, this is helpful. So if I were to go for a backup of the entire disk to protect against 1,2,3,4 and 5 what would you recommend and are there ways to run such backups as incremental backups? And in addition, how can I make sure that the partition table and LVM match the original? Commented Aug 22, 2017 at 11:02
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    For partition table dump/restore you can use sfdisk from the util-linux package. For whole-disk non-incremental backup you can use dd. I am not sure how to deal with whole-disk incremental backups and LVM dump/restore. If you backup with dd you don't need to worry about restoring the LVM. As a casual desktop user I only back up my data. It is simple, faster, and requires less storage. However in the event of a crash, it will take me a few hours to restore my system. I would only consider whole-disk backups on a server where I cannot afford a long downtime in the event of a crash. Commented Aug 22, 2017 at 11:56
  • I used BackInTime which uses rsync for the backup. And I ran sudo sfdisk -d /dev/sda > part_sda to make a backup of the partition table. I hope that's good enough. Commented Aug 23, 2017 at 17:09
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    You might also want to write down the results of sudo pvdisplay. They would help to recreate the LVM if required. With a backintime backup you can definitely restore all your data. If you want to be sure that you can also restore the whole system you could test the procedure with a virtual machine. Commented Aug 24, 2017 at 2:49