HOWTO: Easily make a full system backup (stage4)

jbannon · Posted: Sun Apr 10, 2005 10:07 pm Post subject:

Nice script, well presented and easy to understand. Works fine for me. I haven't been brave enough to wipe my system and try a full restore but listing it certainly seemed fine (no reports of any corruption). Only mods I made were the placement of the backup file on my external iomega drive and to include /usr/portage/distfiles (I wanted this because some packages I had to manually download). One mod I will do is to create the backup on the fast disk and then move it to my iomega as running bzip on that is mighty slow. I'll also use it as a basis for doing some others, like a daily backup of my data and so forth.
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javock · Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2005 1:10 am Post subject:

Hey nice script...

I found it usefull, but, correct me if I am wrong, to make the backup, it first creates the tar, and then compresses it right?
I can't afford to duplicate the space of my instalation, so I made some corrections to the script.
First, as you clearly need some files on the excluded directories, and tar wont accept to exclude the directory and include some file, I create a list with the excluded files, on this list I omit the files to be included on the tar. Then I pass the -X option and this created file to tar and modify the script to pipe the result from tar to gzip/bzip2...

PM me if you are interested on the sugested behavior...

Regards.
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slydini · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2005 4:38 am Post subject:

slydini · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2005 4:49 am Post subject:

Javoc, what are the files that are being excluded that you say are clearly needed? If they are needed then I would be interested in your modifications. I have not restored using this particular script yet but it appears to be viable. I have a spare hard drive so I think I will try to restore to it some time this week.
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BlinkEye · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2005 5:23 am Post subject:

Coume · Guru Joined: 11 Jun 2004 Posts: 306

Hello,

I just come accross this script but have no time right now to test it :/
But after reading the thread, I'm wondering one thing.

couldn't it be possible to generate directly backups CDs which include the LiveCD on the first one, so it could be possible to create an automated restauration script? Cos' the HUGE advantage I see with this script, is to recover a fucked up system while travelling and not having Internet access.
So if it was possible to only carry the backups CDs and knows that everything is in there... It would be perfect.

Just my 2 Euro cents
Ludo
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javock · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2005 12:36 pm Post subject:

feld · Guru Joined: 29 Aug 2004 Posts: 593 Location: USA

If anyone else is having problems compressing with the bzip2 method please take the .tar and attempt to manually bzip2 it with the -s (--small) switch. I was having problems not being able to make it past 400mb and currently with the --small switch I have made it to : 1.3gb (almost done). The speed compressing also appears to be the exact same.

I guess this is supposed to be more memory-friendly and not thrash and stress your RAM so much.

I know my RAM isnt faulty cuz i just tested it with memtest86+ not too long ago... and I have plenty (1gig).

-Feld
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BlinkEye · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2005 6:27 pm Post subject:

BlinkEye · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2005 6:34 pm Post subject:

Coume · Guru Joined: 11 Jun 2004 Posts: 306

Erm, so u really just have to untar the file and you are set??

Sounds too good to be true...

But it will keep in memory, rights, user, etc. ? everything?? no need to chmod thingie, ?

Ludo
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BlinkEye · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2005 6:54 pm Post subject:

ctachta · n00b Joined: 09 Apr 2005 Posts: 39 Location: Glasgow

Everyone,

Can I ask something stupid? :oops:

When the script is interrupted with ctrl-c does it leaves everything somewhere at the hard disk to float. Is that right? Where is that at tha hard drive?

Thanks a lot,
ctachta

BlinkEye · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2005 7:11 pm Post subject:

did you change something? if not - it's in /mnt/backups/stage4/
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ctachta · n00b Joined: 09 Apr 2005 Posts: 39 Location: Glasgow

No I did not. I told you it was stupid question I just figure it out just now.

Thanks VERY VERY much for the script.

ctachta · n00b Joined: 09 Apr 2005 Posts: 39 Location: Glasgow

Guys,

I did try to make the script perform the operation silently by redirecting the output to a file like this

sh mkstage4.sh > stage4.log

and I've got this error/warning

BlinkEye · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2005 7:31 pm Post subject:

yes. this is safe to ignore. such messages result from files which have changed/were deleted while tar is backing them up.
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slydini · Posted: Fri Apr 15, 2005 1:29 am Post subject: Out of the box?

A question for BlinkEye: Is there any way you can eliminate the zip command in your script? What is the purpose of zip? I found that in order to use your script on most of my machines it is nescessary to install zip first. That kind of blows the "out of the box" goal out the window. I really like the script otherwise.

I have some older machines that never get updated at all that I would like to backup with your script but I can't because of the need for zip to be installed. These machines are not connected to the net in any way.

If not, it would be great if someone could create a live-cd that had zip and your script on it.
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BlinkEye · Posted: Fri Apr 15, 2005 9:39 am Post subject:

well, $zip is a variable for either bzip2 or gzip - depending on your choice at the beginning. these are tools, i'd say every system has installed. at the beginning of the script i set a list

slydini · Posted: Fri Apr 15, 2005 1:34 pm Post subject: What a relief.

Now it makes sense. After looking at the script it looked like zip was a variable but I couldn't figure out why it was in the command list. So I checked on portage for a program called zip and sure enough there was one. I emerged zip and the script worked fine after that. So the last few days I have been trying to figure how to get that little zip program on my older "never been updated in almost 2 years" gentoo machines.

I should probably note for the beginners out there that this script or any other for that matter will give you the following error if you copy the script from a windows machine without converting the text file:

gdi2k · Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2005 1:35 pm Post subject: Thanks!

Just wanted to say thanks for an excellent script! I used it to convert my 2 identical hard drives into a RAID 1 array today, without the fear of having to reinstall gentoo again from scratch. It took me a few hours to shift all the data around, and get the disks synched, but it appears to have worked nicely

thomasa88 · Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2005 3:23 pm Post subject:

I mounted a ntfs disc through samba and run the script.

When the tar file is about 2GB this error appears in the script and it starts bzipping.

slydini · Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2005 7:31 pm Post subject:

Damn, I tried to restore and as it was restoring I noticed the leading slashes. So now I am lost as how to get the .tgz file to extract without writing over the currently running Live CD filesystem???? I can't chroot into anything because there is nothing there to chroot too. It's like a catch-22. It makes more sense to have backed up each main filesystem sepearately then use relative pathes so I could restore to the /mnt/gentoo and /mnt/gentoo/boot directory. See what I mean?

If there is another way to restore using the Live-CD and a separate Data CD I am all ears.

Here is the commands I used to restore from my data-CD after I repatitioned and formated:

BlinkEye · Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2005 8:48 pm Post subject:

slydini · Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2005 10:54 pm Post subject:

I actually forgot to put the dot at the end of the tar command in my post to indicate the current directory. I did attempt to cp the tarball to /mnt/gentoo and then extract it but I got the same error. And just think about it a minute if you tar up your system using absolute pathes then / is the same root your running from the Live-CD!!!!!!! So absolute paths don't make any sense at all while booted to a Live-CD. The gentoo stage1-3 tarballs are done with relative paths which makes sense to me. However if there is another method for doing this I am ready to learn.

If anyone has the steps they use to restore using a regular gentoo-live-cd please post your steps. Creating the tarball with this script works great it's the restore steps that need to be clarified.

The error I am getting happens after about 6.5 minutes of extracted files scrolling up the screen then: