HOWTO: Easily make a full system backup (stage4)

booyaa · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 02 Mar 2006 Posts: 85

Guys, I am sure this has been covered, but i would like to ask:

This is an excellent tool.. I used it to successfully back up my system..

Upon restore, I had to recreate partitions (/boot, / , and swap)...

Correct me if I am wrong, but the default grub.conf from the gentoo handbook point the kernetl to HD(0,0)/boot/kernel-xxxxxx

Does the kernel need recompiled and bzImage need recopied to /boot?

Also, a side question, it seems as it my symlink (usr/src/linux was missing.. Anyone experience this?

I really need to get this system back the way it was.. Any help would be appreciated.

Booyaa

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

booyaa · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 02 Mar 2006 Posts: 85

Thanks Sheep. No I did not back up /boot, nor did I have it mounted when I made the backup.

I recreated my partitions and unzipped stage4 to /

Then reinstalled grub and configured grub.conf..

When rebooting it says file not found: /boot/kernel-2.6.15

Am I hosed? Can I still restore?

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

do you have your kernel sources?

if you still have your original .config file (/usr/src/linux-[version]/.config), you can just recompile the kernel.
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booyaa · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 02 Mar 2006 Posts: 85

I have this:

/usr/src/linux-gentoo-2.6.15-r1

I can make menuconfig from the lived CD. It gives me the recompile options.

I have recompiled and copied bzImage to /boot, but it still didnt work.

If I copy that to /boot what tells it where to look? Do I need to recreate a symlink? It is hard to believe that If I have a complete backup of / that I cant simply repartition. recompile, and reload grub and edit grub.conf

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

double check your grub settings. mount /boot and make sure it has your kernel there.

come to think of it, you *should* have had the kernel as the stage4 script *does* mount /boot before tarring everything.

odd.
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booyaa · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 02 Mar 2006 Posts: 85

I know man. I am at this point after my first failure:

I wiped everything.
Booted live CD
Created partitions - file systems
mounted root and boot
cd /
Downloaded the stage 4 tarball
unpacked

I will now emerge sync

Ill then emerge grub and configure grub.conf

Ill then recompile and copy bzImage to /boot-kernel***

Weird cause this is what I thought I did before but grub said it couldnt find my kernel

Dumb noob question: After copying bzImage to /boot/kernel*** , how does the bootloader know where my kernel source is?

BlinkEye · Posted: Tue Apr 11, 2006 5:29 am Post subject:

RaZoR1394 · Guru Joined: 09 Jan 2005 Posts: 356

yabbadabbadont · Posted: Wed Apr 12, 2006 6:53 pm Post subject:

First, thank you for the script. It greatly simplifies my backup process which, unfortunately, I implemented *after* testing the new GUI installer.

I used the instructions in the wiki to restore after I wiped and repartitioned my primary drive. (put win2k back on the system for games and some work I'm doing) It worked very well, but I did run into one issue that hasn't been mentioned in this thread, but is found many places in the forums. Every boot into Gentoo after the restore results in warning messages while the init.d scripts run. "Re-caching dependencies (mtimes differ)" or something close to that. Everything worked, but the messages were annoying. From researching the forums, I found that removing /var/lib/init.d/depcache, /var/lib/init.d/deptree, and then running depscan.sh fixed the problem. There were also indications in some posts that re-emerging baselayout would fix the problem, but since I had already used the first method, I can't say if doing that will work. Anyway, I just wanted to make you aware of this, if you weren't already, so that you can add this to the wiki's known issues section.

P.S. I'm going to re-emerge baselayout just to be safe.

P.P.S. I just found that I had to re-create the /var/log/portage directory too. I guess I need to add it to the custom includes section of the script.
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booyaa · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 02 Mar 2006 Posts: 85

OK Guys question:

I got this working cool and I managed to restore a stage 4 with some kernel and grub tweaks..

Now..

Do you guys think this will work if I want to restore to a whole new hardware platform:

restore stage 4/recompile kernel/reinstall and configure grub?

just curious..

If not.. then what is the easiest way to do this?

I basically am running php-syslog-ng on a gentoo box and want to migrate the solution to another box: more resources

BlinkEye · Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 3:02 pm Post subject:

depending on your CFLAG setting and your CPU change this will work with no problem at all or need (first) a complete re-compile of the system (emerge -e world would be your friend): wiki link
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simeli · Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 2:20 pm Post subject:

Has anyone thought of a way to back up using ftp, scp or sftp. I'd like to backup my home server to my other box, but don't have the space needed to store the tarball locally befor transferring it. so being able to pipe the output over directly to the other box would be awesome. Any ideas how this could be done?
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GetCool · Posted: Sun May 14, 2006 5:09 am Post subject:

Is anyone else having trouble getting this script to work properly these days?

I've used mkstage4.sh for quite a while now, and it's always worked great, but recently, I'm noticing that it's not backing up some pertinent files. Specifically, it skips over the entire /usr directory, as well as certain subdirectories of my /home/user (which are seemingly chosen randomly).

Note that this is happening on a freshly installed system with an unedited mkstage4.sh. Regardless, I have read all the documentation and am quite familiar with how all the variables work in the script (I have customized it in the past in several different ways), so I'm not inclined to believe it's user error (although I won't rule out that possibility).

Since it worked for me for so long but just recently stopped, I am wondering if some recent package update is causing problems with this script, since the script hasn't been updated in a little while. Since it uses standard linux tools, though, I can't understand why this might be so. I've been through the script many times, trying to logically deduce why it isn't backing up /usr and other dirs, but I can't figure it out.

As I said, this even happens on a freshly installed system with a fresh copy of mkstage4.sh (on amd64, at least). I can post more details and/or due some more testing, if anyone has any insight.

castra · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 Aug 2003 Posts: 86

I have issue with backup ( script ) on my PIII machine.
I runed the same script on my main dekstop ( AMD64 ) and there was no problems what so ever so I am preaty sure that
nothing is wrong with it ( added some excluded stuff ).

I get following error:

piwacet · Guru Joined: 30 Dec 2004 Posts: 486

Hi. I'm thinking of making a stage4 based on the wiki, and had a question about the exclude files:

GetCool · Posted: Mon Jun 19, 2006 4:24 pm Post subject:

BlinkEye · Posted: Thu Jun 22, 2006 1:10 pm Post subject: Re: Backup error !

fkamp · n00b Joined: 21 May 2006 Posts: 6

Hi,

Thanks for a great script. This sure beats ghosting!

I have a question. Why not backup all of /usr/src/linux by default?
Is there a reason to only backup .config?
Seems like it would be a good thing to have a backup of your source tree.

Anyway, thanks again!

fkamp

GetCool · Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2006 5:14 pm Post subject: Re: why not?

fkamp · n00b Joined: 21 May 2006 Posts: 6

GetCool,

kg4ysy · Posted: Mon Jul 10, 2006 5:47 pm Post subject:

Awesome script...I have been looking for something like this. I love it. It could come in handy when I don't want to spend a week reinstalling Gentoo...

thx...

gnychis · Posted: Tue Jul 11, 2006 10:22 pm Post subject:

its a great script, i have it in my crontab to backup my computer nightly to an external drive, great for not having to worry about my raid-0 bombing
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dem1an · n00b Joined: 14 May 2002 Posts: 28

I tried restoring my stage4 today and go the following error. =\

tar: /mnt/gentoo: not found in archive
tar: Error exit delayed from previous erros