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Ubuntu has deja-dup preinstalled so you can skip the first command to install it but essentially you will add another disk to you system (ex USB external disk) and backup your home directory to it. Now if your system experiences a failure (eg: hard disk dies) you can restore your files or access your files as they are backed up.
To do this just do the following after plugging in a backup disk (via USB etc). The backup disk will be used completely by the backup. Make sure you have cleared the disk of any files you need using gparted or some other tool.
sudo apt-get install deja-dup
Now open the backups program from activities menu. In my case I have not yet formatted the blank disk I inserted as a test so need to run the disks tool and create a partition on it. I create an ext4 partition but you can choose “other” and type btrfs if you prefer, so you have the option of enabling compression or other things under the mount options if you like.
Then press the play button to mount the disk and it will tell you where its mounted (in my case /media/peter/Backup).
