Hi Mark,
Mark Knecht a écrit :
[...]
happen I have a way to restore where I am today. Since the disk usage
is currently about 4GB it seems like a great time to do it. Is this
possible? I think it's essentially what the stage 3 file is that I use
when I install, isn't it?
If you don't export stage3 and /usr/portage/ files, your backup will be
lighter. The portage tree shouldn't be backed up because it shall be
outdated when you'll restore, and emerge --sync will bring it back
(except if you plan to restore in two weeks and have a low speed
connection so you use emerge-delta-webrsync, but in that case you
already know why you need to keep the tree).
For stage3, you can safely discard it.
Cf. exclude-dires in man tar
From the running system here's what things look like right now:
laptop1 ~ # df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5 15820524 3641240 11375636 25% /
udev 10240 172 10068 2% /dev
/dev/sda6 1320272 189304 1063900 16% /var
/dev/sda7 10278304 312012 9444184 4% /home
shm 1003844 0 1003844 0% /dev/shm
laptop1 ~ #
Tip: use df -h and put it as an alias (alias df='df -h' in .bashrc) ;)
My thought is to boot using the install CD, mount a USB drive at
/mnt/gentoo, then create a mount point 'backup' on the USB drive to
mount each of the 3 partitions I want to back up one at a time. ( /,
/var and /home) Then I'll mount each partition by itself and use tar
to create a single file for each partition where that file gets
written on the USB drive. When I'm done I have 3 files.
Thus, you would be able to restore only one partition if needed, and
there is less chance that all your archive becomes corrupted. I would
process the same way.
You also ought to backup the full MBR, which is a good practice, so you
can bring back your boot sector and the partition table. Backing it up
if very painless, just a dd command, cf. http://gentoo-wiki.com/MBR .
And it saves a *lot* of time when restoring (especially when there is
@&$#! vista partitions with more sectors than there is really on the
disk...)
Restore would be to create the partitions anew, untar, install grub
from in the chroot, and reboot.
So, restore would be a dd command for the MBR, and a mkfs on your
partitions, then untar your backups. So you wouldn't even need to chroot
Is this a reasonable way to go? Is there something easier? (That seems
pretty easy to me...)
It is reasonable, for one single computer. If you've more to manage,
look at dedicated software, or more complex solution as in
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Backup
I don't want to create images of the partitions because I might want
to put the data onto a different drive or in a different
configuration. (Like no /var or something.)
With a separate backup of the MBR, you're free to restore it or not ;)
But if you want to be able to adjust your partition tables, leave free
space on the drive and take a look at LVM, very powerful and easy to use
by now (there's a good tutorial on howtoforge with a debian VMWare
virtual machine)
If this makes sense then what commands would I want to use to do this
correctly. Presumably it needs to tar up links, file system
permissions, and everything else. Since the Quick Install guide uses
You *must* keep permissions of your files, so if you use tar, use -p
option (cf. man), as if you use cp, use -p option.
Or is there more to it?
Yep, that's it. Restore mbr, mkfs, mount, untar, sync(or umount), reboot
I'm rambling here so I'll hope for a quick answer and then give it a try.
Thanks in advance,
Mark
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