HOWTO: Easily make a full system backup (stage4)

someguy · Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2005 9:49 pm Post subject:

wouldnt dd if=/dev/whatever of=/home/whatever.iso bs=512 work ?
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print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`
while [ 1 ] ; do echo "*" | telnet ip.of.print.er 9100 ; done

iq_zero · n00b Joined: 07 Feb 2005 Posts: 25 Location: Sweden

Hello Im having av harddrive that is making a horrible sound so im going to replace it. After looking for easy way of doing this I found this post.
I looks very interesting and I will give it a try.

The link to the script on page 1 is dead please update if the adress is changed i think this would make the wonderful howto complete.
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Would you love a monsterman?
could you understand
the beauty of the beast?
I would do it all for you
would you do it all
do it all for me

koelle · Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 7:36 pm Post subject:

Hi,

i just used the backup script and everything went fine. Now i decided to reinstall WindowsXP. So I first booted the Gentoo 2004.2 Minimal LiveCD and repartitioned my harddisk:

koelle · Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 8:25 pm Post subject:

Hey,

I finally made it to install grub. I just installed SuSe, then chrooted into my Gentoo Environment and installed grub with:

koelle · Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2005 8:56 am Post subject:

Hi,

i solved my problem. I still had root=/dev/hda3 in my grub.conf. It had changed to /dev/hda5. Now it works.

greetings koelle

Hagar · Guru Joined: 11 Feb 2003 Posts: 445

To preserve folder structures you can use the .keep files.

bingobob · Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2005 2:40 pm Post subject:

How can i make this automatic (ie non interactive). I'd like to create a cron job to run the script every week.

cheers

bb

DOSBoy · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Jun 2005 Posts: 84

You could prepare the user input to create the archive as it is very simple. Make a file with something like:

1
y
n

or whatever. (I don't know exactly how the options proceed). Save it to somefile. Then

sh mkstage4.sh < somefile

should do the trick.

Gotterdammerung · Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2005 4:25 am Post subject:

Including me on this thread.
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funkoolow · Posted: Sun Oct 16, 2005 1:26 pm Post subject:

back here for this simple and direct question: since my gentoo works as webserver with php and mysql, is it relevant that during the backup process it's available on web and so it's possible that db and logs and such can be updated and or modified? will be useful and/or safer to stop apache2-mysql-php?

thanks

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Bionut · Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2005 7:20 pm Post subject:

just wanted to say thanks for the script... I'd hate to loose all my config etc because I'm too lazy to do it all myself.
Cheers

tgh · Apprentice Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 222

Noob questions.

1) What is a good directory to keep this script in? Where do admins like to keep scripts like this? I'm guessing "/usr/local/sbin" or should it go straight to "/sbin" since it's a critical file needed to restore the system? (Well, not really, you could restore by hand.) A lot of the pages that talk about directory structure lean more towards putting something like this in /usr/local/sbin, if I understand them correctly:

RedHat 5.0 - section 11.1.1.3
Linux Directory Structure (doc.vic.computerbank.org.au)
Linux Directory Structure (www.comptechdoc.org)

(answered my 2nd quesetion)

funkoolow · Posted: Fri Oct 21, 2005 4:00 pm Post subject:

bigbob73 · Posted: Fri Oct 21, 2005 4:03 pm Post subject:

iq_zero · n00b Joined: 07 Feb 2005 Posts: 25 Location: Sweden

funkoolow · Posted: Mon Nov 07, 2005 12:12 pm Post subject:

Kuhrscher · Posted: Sat Nov 12, 2005 5:23 pm Post subject:

Great script! Thank you!

Lonnie · n00b Joined: 13 Nov 2005 Posts: 3 Location: Minnesota

This may have been answered, but my eyes are starting to cross from reading all the posts, so here goes.
I have a relatively new Gentoo install, only about a couple of weeks old. However, I didn't RTFM nearly as well as I should have. Thus, I have a Very nice partitioning scheme, for a Debian install. Not really very good for a Gentoo install.
What I would like to do is make a complete backup of what I have on here so far.
Totally re-format the hard drive and then restore the system.
I would keep the same partition numbering scheme, but there would be some serious resizing done, and likely make one partition and xfs or reiserfs for use with larger files.
I can burn to DVDs or CDs, and have both available.
So, could I accomplish this by simply commenting out all the "default_exclude_list=" options and changing the destination for the backup?
Here is my df -h output, so a few pointers would also be appreciated, except I will most likely keep all of them.

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 2.8G 178M 2.5G 7% /
udev 501M 212K 501M 1% /dev
/dev/hda6 9.2G 81M 8.7G 1% /home
/dev/hda7 4.6G 3.6G 849M 81% /usr
/dev/hda8 7.4G 228M 6.8G 4% /var
/dev/hda9 4.6G 140M 4.3G 4% /opt
/dev/hda10 8.4G 138M 7.8G 2% /storage
shm 501M 0 501M 0% /dev/shm

Was thinking I could shrink /home down to around 5gig, increase /usr to maybe 8gig, /var and /opt at 1gig each and put all the rest in /storage and make it the xfs or reiserfs to handle any really large files I might run into.

Other than hosing up the initial partitioning scheme, and still having a bit of trouble with playing audio CDs, I am very happy with Gentoo.

Thanks for any and all help.
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BlinkEye · Posted: Sun Nov 13, 2005 4:06 am Post subject:

quote from the script itself about $default_exclude_list:

Sheepdogj15 · Guru Joined: 07 Jan 2005 Posts: 430 Location: Backyard

unless you have security related reasons for being that granular in your partition scheme, i actually would recommend simplifying it a bit. my gentoo workstation is only split between /home and everything else in /. there might be good reason to make /boot a seperate partition (backwards compatibility and such). and sure, if you want make another partition for large files, go ahead.

blinkeye may get annoyed if we talk about this more here, so you may want to just start a new thread elsewhere on the subject.
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Lonnie · n00b Joined: 13 Nov 2005 Posts: 3 Location: Minnesota

Very true, I do not know what my ideas would be doing with your script. So, I will just attempt it. I do have Gentoo installed, so I was able to muddle through setting up fstab at least once.

I did do a trial run with the script and I come up with about a 1gig stage4, and that was with everything that the script would normally accept.

Eyes didn't start crossing until I was into page 6 of 12 of the comments, at around midnight.

For sheepdog, I just like to play with partitions. Had I only made the three partitions suggested, I wouldn't have found this discussion, as I would not have had a need to re-partition my system.

I thank you for your prompt responses, and I assume that what I can't backup with the script is only stuff that will be re-created once I update the system, or in my case, info that I should make copies of before I make the backup attempt.

I really appreciate the hard work that you people do so that non-programmers like myself are able to use such a high quality operating system. Will really be nice once a few others get on the x86_64 bandwagon, like flashplayer.

Thanks again,

Lonnie
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No windows on my computers
Do make a living working on them though
Mostly Debian, so far
Are we having Fun Yet?

BlinkEye · Posted: Sun Nov 13, 2005 4:27 pm Post subject:

hi again. yes, if you haven't fiddled around with serious settings (like changing portage's path and so on) you will not lose any data. there are a lot of things one does not need to backup - because they'll be recreated.

and i do play with partition schemes around a lot myself, and with filesystems too (as i lost a complete reiser4 gentoo installation due to bugs i thought of this backup script).

i completely understand if your eyes are crossing if you read through this hole thread. but this should not be necessary. the thread itself is about problems, questions, suggestions. there's no need to read all the posts. if one does run into "personal" problems you might pm me - this has been done a lot.

i don't get annoyed about posts here at all - i just think it's better for everyone if we talk only about the script and the backup itself to keep the thread consise.
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Ejunkie · n00b Joined: 07 Jan 2005 Posts: 58 Location: 127.0.0.1

hey,

i have a problem with a similar (sorry i hope i wrote is right) script

Sheepdogj15 · Guru Joined: 07 Jan 2005 Posts: 430 Location: Backyard

actually hey BlinkEye, i wonder if there's a way to set it up to save your kernal .config file even if you don't save your sources. that if you have to dokernel recomplies later on you don't have to try to remember all the settings you had. i'm sure it's doable, i just don't know enough about bash scripting to try to customize it in

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-valheru- · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Oct 2005 Posts: 125

Great script. I had a spare hard drive so figured, why not try it? Script ran perfectly, popped in new drive, followed instructions, seemed smooth till the portgage sync. Looked like it went all the way through however at the end I received this error: