Okay, I admit that I don't understand symbolic links for files. Here's what I did, I backed up all the files on my Ubuntu Lucid linux to a backup drive using the commands
rsync -av /folder /backupfolder or cp -ruvp /folder /backupfolder This seems to work quite well, with the exception of the /dev and /proc and /sys folders contents which I guess I don't really care about anyways. Here's what happened yesterday. I erased the files in the /home/me folder on the backup drive, in preparation to do a "fresh" clean copy onto the backup. Since I had previously backed up all the folders from / (root) I decided to get a fresh copy of those folders also to my backup drive, so I started erasing the file folders on the backup drive starting with the /bin folder. Eventually I erased the files in the /lib area on the backup drive. Okay, no apparent problems. Then I erased the files in the /lib32 area on the backup drive and then the /lib64 area, which was a link pointing back to the /lib area. Suddenly I lost my /sbin and /bin commands. The whole system became inoperable and I couldn't do anything at all. I had to do a manual reset to reboot, which failed, of course. I had to rebuild the Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid from scratch and restore all my files and programs again, which became a 7 hour ordeal. Needless to say, this was a painful experience. Apparently removing the link files on my backup actually removed the system files and the link files on the backup, leaving nothing on either drive. (which is exactly an anti-backup) Questions: Should I have booted from a CD disk, to safely scrub the files on the backup drive, then copy from the hard drives to the backup? Both file systems would be off line, so it would appear that this might be the way to go. Should I be using something different than the "cp -ruvp" and "rsync -av" commands to do backups? I really cannot afford to go through another 7 hour re-install again One more question: Is there a clear write up or procedure steps of making a CD or DVD runnable copy of my system, so that I come up on that CD or DVD and have my system intact (bench-marked at a certain update level) and then restore to hard drives? It still took several hours to move from the Ubuntu install disk to the current update level, and it would be much more preferable to do a fresh re-install from current update levels, rather than have to do the laborious updates. Finally, I won't mind if you say that this was not one of my brightest moves. - Randall _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
