Re: system restore from a cron backup

Kevin Kempter wrote:

Hi All;

I've setup a cron backup script to backup my Fedora 10 laptop - mostly in case a new yum update breaks my system.

I'm currently excluding /proc but when the rsync script hits the /sys directory I get lots of read errors like this:

sys/module/vmmon/initstate rsync: read errors mapping "/sys/module/vmmon/initstate": No data available (61) sys/module/vmmon/refcnt rsync: read errors mapping "/sys/module/vmmon/refcnt": No data available (61) sys/module/vmmon/srcversion rsync: read errors mapping "/sys/module/vmmon/srcversion": No data available (61)

Questions:

- should I exclude /sys from my rsync backup ?

Yes, you should exclude /sys, /proc (they're created on the fly by
the kernel...they're not real directories) and /dev.

- Is it safe to restore my system without restoring /proc and /sys ?

Yes, they're created by the kernel at boot time.

- If I do need to restore can I simply do an rsync like this:

rsync -va /backup-location /system-location (i.e. rsync -va /stage/backup/etc /etc)

Will rsync overwrite the files say in /etc with the backed up files even if the current /etc files are newer than the backed up files.

in your cited case) won't be overwritten.  If you're running SELinux,
have a looksee at the rsync_selinux man page, too.

Here's my backup script if it helps:
# cat run_rsync.sh
#!/bin/bash

for I in `cat dirlist`
do
        echo "[$I]"
        echo "=========="
        rsync -av /${I} /stage/backup
done


and here's the dirlist file:
# cat dirlist
bin
boot
dev
docs
download
etc
home
lib
lib64
lost+found
media
mnt
opt
root
sbin
selinux
srv
sys
tmp
usr
var



as always,  thanks in advance...

   rsync -avu --exclude-from=/etc/backup-exclude / /stage/backup

and put the directories you DON'T want backed up in /etc/backup-exclude:

    /sys
    /proc
    /dev

That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

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