backing up and restoring the root partition

[Gene Czarcinski]

In the past, I have always assumed that I would simply re-install if I lost my 
root partition and only did backups for data partitions and home.  My systems 
are configured to have a boot partition, a root ("/") partition, a /home 
partition, and other "my data" partitions.   While I use LVM for my data 
partitons, I have been using a regular disk partition for root.  In the past 
I have used partimage (and now partimage-ng) to backup disk partitions but 
these programs do not work with LVM logical volumes.

Before I commit to putting my root partition on an LVM logical volume, I 
thought I would like to try backing it up ... I have tried using dump/restore 
and tar ... oh, backup/save seems to work just fine (no error message) but 
restore/tar -x is NOT working.

Using restore, I get some selinux errors but not with tar -x.  However, in 
both cases, when I try to boot the system, I am getting errors such as not 
finding /dev/root, /proc, etc.

Has anyone ever done a backup of the root partition?  What program did you 
use?  Have you tried to restore and did it work? [or did you just trust that 
it would?]

I did my testing using vmware virtuals but that should not matter.  I 
installed a"default" F9 installation with /boot and swap on the first scsi 
virtual disk and "/" on a second scsi virtual disk in an LVM logical volume.  
This system boots and runs just fine.

I first tried running from the built system by running dump against an LVM 
snapshot of the root partition.  In another virtual, bootup the F9 install in 
Rescue mode, restore the /boot and swap partitions to the first disk, create 
an LVM partition on the second disk and use pvcreate and vgcfgrestore to 
setup to system to match the original one.  Use restore (lots of selinux 
errors) and try booting ... fails as describe above.

Next, I booted the F9 install cd in Rescue Mode and did the 
dump "standalone" ... the repeated as above with the same result.

Next, use tar --xattrs -vpzcf to create my backup and try again .. save result 
but the tar restore has only a few warning ... but the system does not boot.

Help!  I have not lost anything yet but it sure would be nice to know that a 
root partition can be backed up with something better that just using "dd" to 
create a bit-by-bit image.

BTW, I am interested in an open source solution only ... I am not considering 
commercial products.

Gene