This file is usually found at /home/ username/.ssh/id_rsa.

If you use SSH key-based authentication on your server, your root user won’t have a password set by default, so you’ll need to point rsync to your private key file. You can use the following command to copy the server’s file system, taking care to change the server credentials marked in red. Fortunately, we can exclude these folders from our backup. We won’t be able to back up every folder in the file system, since some of them are temporary storage for running processes. In this example, we are going to use rsync to copy our server’s files to a backup folder on our local computer.

There are several effective ways to back up files on an Ubuntu server. This way, you have the ability to either restore individual files or restore the entire snapshot, depending on the nature of the scenario that necessitates a restore. If you are using DigitalOcean, it’s advised that you make a snapshot through the control panel in addition to syncing the files to your local computer. In this step, we will cover multiple backup methods. Backing up your data beforehand will make it much easier to recover in case of a problem resulting from the upgrade. While the process that we will be going over is the recommended way to perform a release upgrade, there is no way to guarantee that a release upgrade won’t cause issues with software or configurations. Since you are likely using your 12.04 server to handle sensitive tasks or data, it’s very important that you back up the current state of your server configuration and files. You can follow our series on how to migrate to a new Linux server to learn how to migrate between servers. You may still need to review differences in software configuration when upgrading, but the core system will likely have greater stability. To avoid these problems, when possible, we recommend migrating to a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 server rather than upgrading in-place. Comprehensive backups and extensive testing are strongly advised.

Warning: As with almost any upgrade between major releases of an operating system, this process carries an inherent risk of failure, data loss, or broken software configuration.

Download ubuntu 14.04 command line