Re: Does anyone use ZIP disks to backup/restore their system? How?
Hi, I do not understand everything in the MSPLIT description, but I am certainly willing to play around with it. I'm surprised at the few responses I got about my question. I assumed lots of people would be using ZIP disks for a backups/restores. This leads me to ask if most people just backup their important files on linux, and if they lose their system, they reinstall from scratch, then restore just their important (user modified) files? This is how I always worked on Windows 95. If I had a builtin CDROM, and linux was easier to install I might opt for this, but on my Thinkpad 560, it took me 4-5 hours to get everything back. I still don't understand why I trashed my hard disk areas outside of the /dev/hda5 partition, when trying to use cpio directly to try to restore from the KBackup-Arc.arc files on my ZIP disks, that multibuf and afio had problems with. From: E.L. Meijer \(Eric\) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: debian debian-user@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: Does anyone use ZIP disks to backup/restore their system? How? Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 13:29:38 +0100 On Tue, Nov 02, 1999 at 11:56:05AM +0100, Wouter Hanegraaff wrote: On Tue, Nov 02, 1999 at 02:11:09AM -0800, John Miskinis wrote: Hi, I'm hoping to find a set of tools that will allow a linux system to be backed up, and restored, using ZIP disks. I would really appreciate any advise on this subject, from anyone who has successfully restored a system from a multi-volume set. I've heard taper can work with zipdisks. However, if you have enough disk space you can just use tar and split to make a splitted (and gzip'd) tarfile in /tmp, and then just copy the splits to your zipdisk. [... description ...] I wrote a little program that can do this without intermediate storage: MSPLIT(1) Dividing output over multiple volumes.MSPLIT(1) NAME msplit - a utility to divide output over multiple flop pies, zip disks, etc SYNOPSIS command | msplit mount dir output DESCRIPTION This manual page describes version 0.2 of msplit. Msplit reads data from the standard input (usually a pipe), and writes it to files named output.num, where num is an increasing number, in a directory on which a removable medium can be mounted. Typical uses will be to distribute data over multiple floppies or zip disks. You should not mount anything before running the command. Msplit will ask the user to insert the removable volume, and try to mount it with the command `mount mount dir'. Then it will open a file named output.0, and write until there is no more input or the volume is full. If the lat ter case applies, msplit will umount the directory, ask for another volume (usually a disk), mount it, and start writing output.1. This process continues until there is no more input. Note that msplit does not erase any data found on the disks, it only adds to them. This makes it more flexible than using regular split(1). Another advan tage above split is that no intermediary files are cre ated. The current version also lists the contents of the mounted volume, and offers the possibility to erase everything. Restoring without intermediate files could also be done with a procedure like this (and this applies also to archives made with regular split): Open an xterm, and do $ mkfifo tarfile $ tar xvf tarfile Open another xterm, and supposing you have used msplit and generated files named backup.0 .. backup.2 on different zip disks, do something like (this assumes you use bash) $ exec 3tarfile insert first zip disk $ mount /zip; cat /zip/backup.0 13; umount /zip insert second zip disk $ mount /zip; cat /zip/backup.1 13; umount /zip insert third zip disk $ mount /zip; cat /zip/backup.2 13; umount /zip $ exec 31 Be sure to do this from the right directory. In between the cat commands you can give any commands you like, but make sure to cat the backup files to file descriptor 3 in the right order! If I get around it, one day I will write `mcat' which automates this procedure and complements msplit. Personally I use msplit mostly for floppies, so it is in general not impossible to store the intermediate files. If anyone is interested in `msplit' I can email it to them. If anyone feels like putting it in a debian package I'll tack on a GPL licence and you can go ahead. Of course there are no warranties ... -- E.L. Meijer ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Eindhoven Univ. of Technology Lab. for Catalysis and Inorg. Chem. (SKA) -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null __ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
Re: Does anyone use ZIP disks to backup/restore their system? How?
On Tue, Nov 02, 1999 at 06:29:45PM -0800, John Miskinis wrote: Hi, [...] This leads me to ask if most people just backup their important files on linux, and if they lose their system, they reinstall from scratch, then restore just their important (user modified) files? Not even that. I only safeguard my own products (TeX files, fractals, programs). The rest I have on CD, and the second time I install something I usually configure things faster. Sometimes it is nice to try some new settings. This is how I always worked on Windows 95. If I had a builtin CDROM, and linux was easier to install I might opt for this, but on my Thinkpad 560, it took me 4-5 hours to get everything back. It probably would take me the same amount of time. But then again, it doesn't happen a lot. Eric -- E.L. Meijer ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Eindhoven Univ. of Technology Lab. for Catalysis and Inorg. Chem. (SKA)
Re: Does anyone use ZIP disks to backup/restore their system? How?
On 02 Nov 1999, John Miskinis wrote: Hi, I do not understand everything in the MSPLIT description, but I am certainly willing to play around with it. I'm surprised at the few responses I got about my question. I assumed lots of people would be using ZIP disks for a backups/restores. This leads me to ask if most people just backup their important files on linux, and if they lose their system, they reinstall from scratch, then restore just their important (user modified) files? This is how I always worked on Windows 95. If I had a builtin CDROM, and linux was easier to install I might opt for this, but on my Thinkpad 560, it took me 4-5 hours to get everything back. I still don't understand why I trashed my hard disk areas outside of the /dev/hda5 partition, when trying to use cpio directly to try to restore from the KBackup-Arc.arc files on my ZIP disks, that multibuf and afio had problems with. [snip] I do the above. I have an Iomega Zip; I backup my /home/ac and /etc (should probably do /usr/local as well). If I had to reinstall I would do it from the CD. Anthony -- Anthony Campbell - running Linux - Debian 2.1 (Windows-free zone) Book Reviews: www.pentelikon.co.uk/bookreviews/ Alternative email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] It's no go the Yogi Man, it's no go Blavatsky. - Louis MacNeice
RE: Does anyone use ZIP disks to backup/restore their system? How?
Yet another recommendation for backing up system configuration only. I guess we should be keeping root log files which we use to describe when and what we changed. That way, when we break something, it is easier to backtrack. Use this to tell changed files in the OS and back those up only. Another way I use is to copy a file to .org whenever I modify it for the first time. I.e. exim.conf would copy to exim.conf.org. Then use locate and find all of the .org files. These files are not real useful in themselves. Instead back up the corresponding non-.org file (I.e. exim.conf). I just copy the files to a user home directory and FTP them to another machine for backup. This is a potential security issue due to the ease of FTP access, but on my isolated network it's no problem. If it is an issue, you could tar, compress and encrypt if it is worth the trouble. This must be done manually, but only needs to be done when you change the configuration. paul -Original Message- From: E.L. Meijer (Eric) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 1999 3:37 AM To: debian Subject: Re: Does anyone use ZIP disks to backup/restore their system? How? On Tue, Nov 02, 1999 at 06:29:45PM -0800, John Miskinis wrote: Hi, [...] This leads me to ask if most people just backup their important files on linux, and if they lose their system, they reinstall from scratch, then restore just their important (user modified) files? Not even that. I only safeguard my own products (TeX files, fractals, programs). The rest I have on CD, and the second time I install something I usually configure things faster. Sometimes it is nice to try some new settings. This is how I always worked on Windows 95. If I had a builtin CDROM, and linux was easier to install I might opt for this, but on my Thinkpad 560, it took me 4-5 hours to get everything back. It probably would take me the same amount of time. But then again, it doesn't happen a lot. Eric -- E.L. Meijer ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Eindhoven Univ. of Technology Lab. for Catalysis and Inorg. Chem. (SKA) -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null
Re: Does anyone use ZIP disks to backup/restore their system? How?
Hi, Thanks for the replies, it's really nice to know how others deal with the backup issue(s). I'm really hoping to implement a backup strategy that will allow me to backup/restore my entire linux system. Over the last 10 hours or so, I have been researching taper as a means. I checked out a couple others, but one needed libc5 libraries, and I wasn't sure if the other would work with multiple volumes. Taper seems to be quite slick. I did a full backup, which only spanned 2 volumes, instead of 3 with kbackup. Unfortunately I can't seem to fit taper on my rescue disk. It has library dependencies (curses? forms?) but allows static building. But the static binaries become QUITE large. I tried pruning down my rescue system as small as possible, but I think I need to start from scratch again. I use zdisk which is also quite slick. It copies a specified kernel (mine!) and an MSDOS filed filesystem (compressed). The MSDOS file system actually includes an ext2 filed filesystem (compressed) and syslinux. It was a little trickly to figure it out, but I did, and am impressed. BUT, I think my MSDOS filed filesystem is not compressing as small as it should, because I have changed it REPEATEDLY. I remember seeing some notes somewhere about this (bootkit?) and why the /dev/zero is used as the input file when creating a file to be used as a loop device. I think it may actually be possible to use zdisk to create a 1 floppy boot/root disk, that will allow a taper restore to happen. My brain is a little fried after the last 10 hours or so on this project, but I will be persuing this again in the near future. I may have to resort to having the taper and bg_restore binaries on a seperate floppy. If I ever get this working, I would be interested to know if people would benefit from a web page on all of this stuff. I planned to have a linux on IBM Thinkpad 560 up at some point anyway, as it's very tricky to get linux on this machine with no network connectivity and no builtin CD! John From: E.L. Meijer \(Eric\) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: debian debian-user@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: Does anyone use ZIP disks to backup/restore their system? How? Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 09:37:07 +0100 On Tue, Nov 02, 1999 at 06:29:45PM -0800, John Miskinis wrote: Hi, [...] This leads me to ask if most people just backup their important files on linux, and if they lose their system, they reinstall from scratch, then restore just their important (user modified) files? Not even that. I only safeguard my own products (TeX files, fractals, programs). The rest I have on CD, and the second time I install something I usually configure things faster. Sometimes it is nice to try some new settings. This is how I always worked on Windows 95. If I had a builtin CDROM, and linux was easier to install I might opt for this, but on my Thinkpad 560, it took me 4-5 hours to get everything back. It probably would take me the same amount of time. But then again, it doesn't happen a lot. Eric -- E.L. Meijer ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Eindhoven Univ. of Technology Lab. for Catalysis and Inorg. Chem. (SKA) -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null __ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
RE: Does anyone use ZIP disks to backup/restore their system? How?
I would definitely be interested in the web page ! Something else I use Disk Image. It creates a complete image of your HD saving all partitions to a file on another hard drive. This file can be restored later and presto, you have a complete system the way you left it :) This was intended for commercial outfits like Dell. They configure a system once and then duplicate the HD. If you do, any disk will work as a secondary disk and the whole program fits on one floppy ! You still need a boot floppy. I burned a CDROM and have a boot floppy that will boot almost any system (in DOS) and give a menu of most all the available CDROM drivers. I then put CDROM in and restore the saved image. This is probably not practical for routine backups. paul -Original Message- From: John Miskinis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 1999 6:03 AM To: debian-user@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: Does anyone use ZIP disks to backup/restore their system? How? Hi, Thanks for the replies, it's really nice to know how others deal with the backup issue(s). I'm really hoping to implement a backup strategy that will allow me to backup/restore my entire linux system. Over the last 10 hours or so, I have been researching taper as a means. I checked out a couple others, but one needed libc5 libraries, and I wasn't sure if the other would work with multiple volumes. Taper seems to be quite slick. I did a full backup, which only spanned 2 volumes, instead of 3 with kbackup. Unfortunately I can't seem to fit taper on my rescue disk. It has library dependencies (curses? forms?) but allows static building. But the static binaries become QUITE large. I tried pruning down my rescue system as small as possible, but I think I need to start from scratch again. I use zdisk which is also quite slick. It copies a specified kernel (mine!) and an MSDOS filed filesystem (compressed). The MSDOS file system actually includes an ext2 filed filesystem (compressed) and syslinux. It was a little trickly to figure it out, but I did, and am impressed. BUT, I think my MSDOS filed filesystem is not compressing as small as it should, because I have changed it REPEATEDLY. I remember seeing some notes somewhere about this (bootkit?) and why the /dev/zero is used as the input file when creating a file to be used as a loop device. I think it may actually be possible to use zdisk to create a 1 floppy boot/root disk, that will allow a taper restore to happen. My brain is a little fried after the last 10 hours or so on this project, but I will be persuing this again in the near future. I may have to resort to having the taper and bg_restore binaries on a seperate floppy. If I ever get this working, I would be interested to know if people would benefit from a web page on all of this stuff. I planned to have a linux on IBM Thinkpad 560 up at some point anyway, as it's very tricky to get linux on this machine with no network connectivity and no builtin CD! John From: E.L. Meijer \(Eric\) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: debian debian-user@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: Does anyone use ZIP disks to backup/restore their system? How? Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 09:37:07 +0100 On Tue, Nov 02, 1999 at 06:29:45PM -0800, John Miskinis wrote: Hi, [...] This leads me to ask if most people just backup their important files on linux, and if they lose their system, they reinstall from scratch, then restore just their important (user modified) files? Not even that. I only safeguard my own products (TeX files, fractals, programs). The rest I have on CD, and the second time I install something I usually configure things faster. Sometimes it is nice to try some new settings. This is how I always worked on Windows 95. If I had a builtin CDROM, and linux was easier to install I might opt for this, but on my Thinkpad 560, it took me 4-5 hours to get everything back. It probably would take me the same amount of time. But then again, it doesn't happen a lot. Eric -- E.L. Meijer ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Eindhoven Univ. of Technology Lab. for Catalysis and Inorg. Chem. (SKA) -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null __ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null
Does anyone use ZIP disks to backup/restore their system? How?
Hi, I'm hoping to find a set of tools that will allow a linux system to be backed up, and restored, using ZIP disks. I would really appreciate any advise on this subject, from anyone who has successfully restored a system from a multi-volume set. I'm really stuck, trying to figure out everything I did to get my PCMCIA-SCSI-CDROM and IMM zip working, and when I do, I do not want to experiment with backup/restore solutions on my own! Many thanks as always, John __ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
Re: Does anyone use ZIP disks to backup/restore their system? How?
On Tue, Nov 02, 1999 at 02:11:09AM -0800, John Miskinis wrote: Hi, I'm hoping to find a set of tools that will allow a linux system to be backed up, and restored, using ZIP disks. I would really appreciate any advise on this subject, from anyone who has successfully restored a system from a multi-volume set. I've heard taper can work with zipdisks. However, if you have enough disk space you can just use tar and split to make a splitted (and gzip'd) tarfile in /tmp, and then just copy the splits to your zipdisk. This requires some extra disk space but makes life rather easy so you could do cd /tmp tar -cvf- /home | split --bytes=90m - home.tar. This will tar /home and pipe the result to split which creates files of 90 MB each. Now you will have in /tmp/ a set of files named home.tar.aa, home.tar.ab, etc. and you copy each of these files to a seperate zipdisk To restore the system you first restore the tarfile by cat /zip/home.tar.aX /tmp/home.tar for each zipdisk (be careful to use the right order or you'll be in serious trouble) Then you can simply do cd / tar xf /tmp/home.tar to restore your homedir Have fun, Wouter
Re: Does anyone use ZIP disks to backup/restore their system? How?
On Tue, Nov 02, 1999 at 11:56:05AM +0100, Wouter Hanegraaff wrote: On Tue, Nov 02, 1999 at 02:11:09AM -0800, John Miskinis wrote: Hi, I'm hoping to find a set of tools that will allow a linux system to be backed up, and restored, using ZIP disks. I would really appreciate any advise on this subject, from anyone who has successfully restored a system from a multi-volume set. I've heard taper can work with zipdisks. However, if you have enough disk space you can just use tar and split to make a splitted (and gzip'd) tarfile in /tmp, and then just copy the splits to your zipdisk. [... description ...] I wrote a little program that can do this without intermediate storage: MSPLIT(1) Dividing output over multiple volumes.MSPLIT(1) NAME msplit - a utility to divide output over multiple flop pies, zip disks, etc SYNOPSIS command | msplit mount dir output DESCRIPTION This manual page describes version 0.2 of msplit. Msplit reads data from the standard input (usually a pipe), and writes it to files named output.num, where num is an increasing number, in a directory on which a removable medium can be mounted. Typical uses will be to distribute data over multiple floppies or zip disks. You should not mount anything before running the command. Msplit will ask the user to insert the removable volume, and try to mount it with the command `mount mount dir'. Then it will open a file named output.0, and write until there is no more input or the volume is full. If the lat ter case applies, msplit will umount the directory, ask for another volume (usually a disk), mount it, and start writing output.1. This process continues until there is no more input. Note that msplit does not erase any data found on the disks, it only adds to them. This makes it more flexible than using regular split(1). Another advan tage above split is that no intermediary files are cre ated. The current version also lists the contents of the mounted volume, and offers the possibility to erase everything. Restoring without intermediate files could also be done with a procedure like this (and this applies also to archives made with regular split): Open an xterm, and do $ mkfifo tarfile $ tar xvf tarfile Open another xterm, and supposing you have used msplit and generated files named backup.0 .. backup.2 on different zip disks, do something like (this assumes you use bash) $ exec 3tarfile insert first zip disk $ mount /zip; cat /zip/backup.0 13; umount /zip insert second zip disk $ mount /zip; cat /zip/backup.1 13; umount /zip insert third zip disk $ mount /zip; cat /zip/backup.2 13; umount /zip $ exec 31 Be sure to do this from the right directory. In between the cat commands you can give any commands you like, but make sure to cat the backup files to file descriptor 3 in the right order! If I get around it, one day I will write `mcat' which automates this procedure and complements msplit. Personally I use msplit mostly for floppies, so it is in general not impossible to store the intermediate files. If anyone is interested in `msplit' I can email it to them. If anyone feels like putting it in a debian package I'll tack on a GPL licence and you can go ahead. Of course there are no warranties ... -- E.L. Meijer ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Eindhoven Univ. of Technology Lab. for Catalysis and Inorg. Chem. (SKA)
