On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 08:31:31PM +0200, JPH wrote: > It is virtually impossible to do a full restore without doing some > serious after work. The problem is at least that your boot sector is not > being backed up, and if it would be, it'd be most probably useless > because the file layout on disk has changed. Another problem you'll run > in to with Ubuntu is that the filesystem's UUID's have changed during > format.
While I don't know how Grub-2 does things, with Grub-1 I name the partitions and use those names in fstab. I also do recovery in a script (running on a second machine) that does the format and grub install. My full-disk restores are automated, so they use clock time but not a lot of serious user time, beyond decisions as to what to restore. Also, when I buy a disk for installation, I buy an identical spare. They are cheap enough, and that saves the trouble of deciding how to adapt to a different drive size. The original questioner was thinking ahead - when you need to do a full disk restore, it always happens at an inconvenient time. Thus, it is good to have all the scripts written and materials available, so when that sad day comes the stress is minimized. That includes setting up the original disk for easiest restore. Many "features" like UUID partition labels in fstab, or even LVM (without proper tools for rebuilding) can get in the way of restore, without much more sophisticated scripts to do the recovery. Note, many recovery steps are aided by swap enclosures. Another way to quicken recovery is to save the first few kilobytes of each drive, df information, and sfdisk information with every backup. Yet another aid is to put three partitions on each backup drive, with a small bootable OS partition and swap. When I build a new backup drive, I typically just "dd" the OS partition from an older backup drive to a newer one. With a two-drive system, that can be done by dd-ing the old partition to a file, then "dd" again onto the new drive OS partition. My worst case was a drive failure on my laptop the night before a plane flight and a long trip. With all the automation in place, it was a simple matter of putting the spare laptop drive in a swap tray in a 2 drive system, booting from the backup drive, starting the script, and going to bed. A few hours later, I had a drive ready to swap into the laptop. On the plane, I loaded the failed hard drive into a second drive bay on my laptop, and was able to recover most of the files I had worked on the day before the failure. Many of these features should be in a new program which might be called "divish-restore-ultra". A better programmer than I can write it. Similarly, perhaps someone can write a guide to setting up a computer for maximum dirvish/rsync friendliness. But those hypothetical people have more time than I do. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ Dirvish mailing list [email protected] http://www.dirvish.org/mailman/listinfo/dirvish
