Upgrading to Ubuntu 20, *how* to back up?

[Colin Law]

On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 at 17:27, Bo Berglund <bo.berglund at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 16:10:46 +0100, David Fletcher
> <dave at thefletchers.net> wrote:
>
> >On Sat, 2020-04-25 at 15:09 +0200, Bo Berglund wrote:
> >> "We recommend that you backup your existing Ubuntu installation before
> >> you update your computer."

I am not going to give any advice on this just in case it all goes
pear shaped, but I have never had a problem that trashed the system
doing an upgrade of a working ubuntu to the next release, and I have
never backed up the operating system itself.
Obviously any important data I have will already be backed up, so I
check that the backups are ok (and then probably make a completely
independent backup again just in case).  Then I go for it and do a
backup using the provided utilities.
The couple of times I have lost a system have both been due to disc
failure and I think losing a system is much more likely due to this
than a backup going wrong.
What I do, however, to ease the process of recovering a lost system is
to use Ansible for building my machines, so after re-installing the OS
the process of getting the system back to a running state is almost
trivial.

Colin