how do i backup all my data and restore?

David L Norris dave at webaugur.com
Mon Jan 12 15:52:10 UTC 2004


On Mon, 2004-01-12 at 09:56, Emiliano Brunetti wrote:
> I'll try, thanks. Did you ever try a restore too? Did it work? I tried
> once with 'cp -a' but when i tried to restore, many of local
> configuration were unusable and i had to personalize again everything.
> ;( Maybe i did something wrong...

I use "cp -a" to do nightly backups of several GB from one machine to
another via NFS.  It works very well.  The backup machine is mirrored in
case of a hardware failure on the main machine.

The main problem is that cp doesn't offer any assurance that the files
were copied correctly.  If there are disk errors (bad sectors, etc) it
is possible to end up with corrupted files.  I've had this happen about
10 times in the past 5 years.  It was always caused by bad disks or poor
connections.  I always try to verify the copy before I destroy the
original.  That may be difficult in your case.

As someone else suggested Mondo may be better.  Mondo appears to also
backup to CD-ROM or Tape.  That might be best if you don't have much
data to backup.  (It would be a problem in my case since I have hundreds
of GB in /home...)

> Well, it is on a specific partition. When i installed FC1, it was just
> for a test. Now i want to stay with it, so i need some 'fine tuning',
> namely /home is too small and i need to resize. Well, there was no way.
> Neither parted or qtparted worked with ext3, Pmagic is not a option and
> so i thought about reinstalling.

I've had that problem a few times...  Now I keep /home on separate disks
so I can maintain it independent of the system partitions/disks.  To
upgrade I install a new disk and use "cp -a" to copy from the old disk
to the new disk.  Then I can remount the new disk to /home.


I was experimenting with LVM a few days ago.  I think my next disk
upgrade is going to use LVM volumes on software RAID-1 devices.  e2fsadm
appears to work great to shrink and grow ext3 partitions on LVM volumes.

-- 
 David Norris
  http://www.webaugur.com/dave/
  ICQ - 412039
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