On 02/24/2010 08:18 PM, Antonio Olivares wrote:
> Dear fellow Fedora users& list members,
>
> On the kmail thread, sarcasm included :), I noticed the references to rsync and partimage respectively. Both are recommended to make backups in order to prevent from BAD UPDATES to render your machine/working programs to a halt :(, and get back up easily. I have not used any of the two and would appreciate some command line examples of how the two work in case I decide to do the same.
>
> I have a copy of SystemRescueCD, GpartedLiveCD, in case either of the two are handy in this situation. I have run rawhide and have been lucky to get back up from those BAD UPDATES once in a while and the test list is very generous with their help and guidance.
partimage is restricted to backing up and restoring entire disk partitions
that appear in /proc/partitions, and that partition cannot be currently
mounted, not even read-only. It cannot restore to anything other than
a partition, which of course must be at least as large as the partition
that was backed up. It is fine for restoring the exact state of a file
system including all metadata, but is not very useful as a general purpose
backup solution.
rsync can be used to maintain a mirror of a file system as long as you
aren't particular about preserving metadata such as access times and
inode numbers. The drawback is that a mirror is for one point in time
only. If you want multiple backup levels you have to have storage for
several complete mirrors.
Personally, I've been using rdiff-backup, which is also included in
SystemRescueCD. It combines an rsync mirror with a series of reverse
diffs that allow you to restore any subset of the backup to any state
that was previously backed up. There's a bit of a learning curve, and
right now SELinux context does not seem to get restored (nothing that
'restorecon' can't fix). The main limitations of rdiff-backup are
(a) a complete inability to merge together old increments, such as
eliminating very old daily increments and leaving just the weekly
backup points, and (b) extreme difficulty in deleting something that
you really hadn't intended to back up, such as that 4GB DVD image
that was temporarily in your home directory. I've managed to handle
item "b" with what is undoubtedly the most incomprehensible 400-line
shell script I've ever written, but I've had no success trying to deal
with "a" other than by brute force working through the entire backup
history re-creating each restore point that I want to save and
creating a new backup from that. Totally impractical!
--
Bob Nichols "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
Do NOT delete it.
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