making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2

making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2

[Nick Gawronski]

Hi, I was wanting to backup my linux system running debian unstable so I can 
keep a backup off of my system before I start installing lots of software I 
want to be able to quickly restore to a usable state with out reinstalling 
everything.  I want to make a backup of just one partition as I have linux 
on one partition and will be saving the backup to an USB flash drive that 
will be mounted as well.  What I don't want to happen is for the tar program 
to also backup all mount points and their contents but I do want it to 
backup the directories on my ext3 filesystem and the directories for the 
mount points so when I restore the backup there will be empty directories 
for my USB flash drives and not directories with all of the contents from 
the drive when the backup was made.  What would be the best command to do 
this and use bzip2 with the minus 9 compression option and preserve 
permitions and directory structure? 

Re: making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2

[Gregory Nowak]

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Hash: SHA1

Provided that doing the backup while not booted into the system you
want to back up isn't an issue for you, I'd say partition image fits
all the criteria you specified nicely. http://www.partimage.org

Greg


On Thu, Jan 01, 2009 at 01:10:19AM -0600, Nick Gawronski wrote:
> Hi, I was wanting to backup my linux system running debian unstable so I 
> can keep a backup off of my system before I start installing lots of 
> software I want to be able to quickly restore to a usable state with out 
> reinstalling everything.  I want to make a backup of just one partition 
> as I have linux on one partition and will be saving the backup to an USB 
> flash drive that will be mounted as well.  What I don't want to happen is 
> for the tar program to also backup all mount points and their contents 
> but I do want it to backup the directories on my ext3 filesystem and the 
> directories for the mount points so when I restore the backup there will 
> be empty directories for my USB flash drives and not directories with all 
> of the contents from the drive when the backup was made.  What would be 
> the best command to do this and use bzip2 with the minus 9 compression 
> option and preserve permitions and directory structure? 
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>

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Re: making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2

[Gregory Nowak]

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Hash: SHA1

I don't usually reply to my posts, but I forgot to mention that if you
want to use tar, but not have it archive file systems other than the /
directory, just umount those file systems before starting the tar job.

Greg


On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 08:06:13PM -0700, Gregory Nowak wrote:
> Provided that doing the backup while not booted into the system you
> want to back up isn't an issue for you, I'd say partition image fits
> all the criteria you specified nicely. http://www.partimage.org
> 
> Greg
> 
> 


- -- 
web site: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org
gpg public key: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org/pubkey.asc
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(authorization required, add me to your contacts list first)

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Re: making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2

[Nick Gawronski]

Hi, I was planning on using a linux live CD mounting the ext3 filesystem 
using it and doing the backup using that.  I want something that I can 
resize the partition then uncompress the backup image into the new root 
partition so I don't want something that will store filesystem information 
just archive files preserving permitions.  I have the gentoo 2007.0 liveCD 
that has speakup on it and I was planning to use it for packing and 
unpacking the backup.  Should I still use tar or should I use another tool 
for this purpose?  I want something that is free and open source.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gregory Nowak" <greg@romuald.net.eu.org>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2008 9:09 PM
Subject: Re: making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2


> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> I don't usually reply to my posts, but I forgot to mention that if you
> want to use tar, but not have it archive file systems other than the /
> directory, just umount those file systems before starting the tar job.
>
> Greg
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 08:06:13PM -0700, Gregory Nowak wrote:
>> Provided that doing the backup while not booted into the system you
>> want to back up isn't an issue for you, I'd say partition image fits
>> all the criteria you specified nicely. http://www.partimage.org
>>
>> Greg
>>
>>
>
>
> - -- 
> web site: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org
> gpg public key: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org/pubkey.asc
> skype: gregn1
> (authorization required, add me to your contacts list first)
>
> - --
> Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager@EU.org
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iEYEARECAAYFAklcM+oACgkQ7s9z/XlyUyDvGACfbIcyvT40WWswaD2JC3A7SOTE
> TSsAoM71tVs3IvRaWg2EybSoI30+wOcK
> =8vJo
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 

Re: making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2

[Tony Baechler]

Keep in mind that most USB drives are formatted as FAT32.  That means 
that you can't have archives over 2 GB in size.  Unless you have a means 
of splitting and recombining files like an extra partition or your 
filesystem will never grow above 2 GB, tar and bz2 probably won't work 
with USB.  You could try backing up to a network drive with Samba or 
similar.  I'm fairly sure that grml has smbclient and support for 
mounting smb shares but I don't know about Gentoo.

Nick Gawronski wrote:
> Hi, I was wanting to backup my linux system running debian unstable so 
> I can keep a backup off of my system before I start installing lots of 
> software I want to be able to quickly restore to a usable state with 
> out reinstalling everything.  I want to make a backup of just one 
> partition as I have linux on one partition and will be saving the 
> backup to an USB flash drive that will be mounted as well.  What I 
> don't want to happen is for the tar program to also backup all mount 
> points and their contents but I do want it to backup the directories 
> on my ext3 filesystem and the directories for the mount points so when 
> I restore the backup there will be empty directories for my USB flash 
> drives and not directories with all of the contents from the drive 
> when the backup was made.  What would be the best command to do this 
> and use bzip2 with the minus 9 compression option and preserve 
> permitions and directory structure?
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>
>

Re: making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2

[Nick Stockton]

The USB thumb drive could always be formatted with ext2 or some other 
non-journeling file system.
If You would rather use fat32 though, you can always store the large archive 
in a temporary place and use split to split the file in to how ever many 
chunks you want and copy them to the USB drive.  Then when you want to 
restore the archive you can use cat to concatenate the small chunks back in 
to the big archive.

Nick Stockton
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tony Baechler" <tony@baechler.net>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Thursday, January 01, 2009 8:29 AM
Subject: Re: making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2


> Keep in mind that most USB drives are formatted as FAT32.  That means that 
> you can't have archives over 2 GB in size.  Unless you have a means of 
> splitting and recombining files like an extra partition or your filesystem 
> will never grow above 2 GB, tar and bz2 probably won't work with USB.  You 
> could try backing up to a network drive with Samba or similar.  I'm fairly 
> sure that grml has smbclient and support for mounting smb shares but I 
> don't know about Gentoo.
>
> Nick Gawronski wrote:
>> Hi, I was wanting to backup my linux system running debian unstable so I 
>> can keep a backup off of my system before I start installing lots of 
>> software I want to be able to quickly restore to a usable state with out 
>> reinstalling everything.  I want to make a backup of just one partition 
>> as I have linux on one partition and will be saving the backup to an USB 
>> flash drive that will be mounted as well.  What I don't want to happen is 
>> for the tar program to also backup all mount points and their contents 
>> but I do want it to backup the directories on my ext3 filesystem and the 
>> directories for the mount points so when I restore the backup there will 
>> be empty directories for my USB flash drives and not directories with all 
>> of the contents from the drive when the backup was made.  What would be 
>> the best command to do this and use bzip2 with the minus 9 compression 
>> option and preserve permitions and directory structure?
>> _______________________________________________
>> Speakup mailing list
>> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
>> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>
> __________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus 
> signature database 3727 (20081231) __________
>
> The message was checked by ESET Smart Security.
>
> http://www.eset.com
>
>
> 

Re: making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2

[Nick Gawronski]

Hi, so what command would I run from the mount point where my USB drive was 
mounted to only backup the local ext3 filesystem using tar so the contents 
of the USB drive would not be included in my backup and when I wanted to 
restore it I would be in the directory where the USB drive was mounted and 
would mount my system on another mount point what would I type to do the 
restoration?
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Nick Stockton" <nstockton@gmail.com>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Thursday, January 01, 2009 7:48 AM
Subject: Re: making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2


> The USB thumb drive could always be formatted with ext2 or some other 
> non-journeling file system.
> If You would rather use fat32 though, you can always store the large 
> archive in a temporary place and use split to split the file in to how 
> ever many chunks you want and copy them to the USB drive.  Then when you 
> want to restore the archive you can use cat to concatenate the small 
> chunks back in to the big archive.
>
> Nick Stockton
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Tony Baechler" <tony@baechler.net>
> To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." 
> <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
> Sent: Thursday, January 01, 2009 8:29 AM
> Subject: Re: making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2
>
>
>> Keep in mind that most USB drives are formatted as FAT32.  That means 
>> that you can't have archives over 2 GB in size.  Unless you have a means 
>> of splitting and recombining files like an extra partition or your 
>> filesystem will never grow above 2 GB, tar and bz2 probably won't work 
>> with USB.  You could try backing up to a network drive with Samba or 
>> similar.  I'm fairly sure that grml has smbclient and support for 
>> mounting smb shares but I don't know about Gentoo.
>>
>> Nick Gawronski wrote:
>>> Hi, I was wanting to backup my linux system running debian unstable so I 
>>> can keep a backup off of my system before I start installing lots of 
>>> software I want to be able to quickly restore to a usable state with out 
>>> reinstalling everything.  I want to make a backup of just one partition 
>>> as I have linux on one partition and will be saving the backup to an USB 
>>> flash drive that will be mounted as well.  What I don't want to happen 
>>> is for the tar program to also backup all mount points and their 
>>> contents but I do want it to backup the directories on my ext3 
>>> filesystem and the directories for the mount points so when I restore 
>>> the backup there will be empty directories for my USB flash drives and 
>>> not directories with all of the contents from the drive when the backup 
>>> was made.  What would be the best command to do this and use bzip2 with 
>>> the minus 9 compression option and preserve permitions and directory 
>>> structure?
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Speakup mailing list
>>> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
>>> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>>>
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Speakup mailing list
>> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
>> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>>
>> __________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus 
>> signature database 3727 (20081231) __________
>>
>> The message was checked by ESET Smart Security.
>>
>> http://www.eset.com
>>
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 

Re: making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2

[Tony Baechler]

Nick Gawronski wrote:
> Hi, so what command would I run from the mount point where my USB 
> drive was mounted to only backup the local ext3 filesystem using tar 
> so the contents of the USB drive would not be included in my backup 
> and when I wanted to restore it I would be in the directory where the 
> USB drive was mounted and would mount my system on another mount point 
> what would I type to do the restoration?



Hi,

Try this:

man tar
tar --help

Seriously, that's why we have man pages. Even most rescue CDs include 
them and they generally answer your questions. I'll give you a clue 
though. You want to have it create a file and not write to tape. I know 
of no easy way to generate the archive, split it, copy it, cat it and 
extract unless you have an extra partition somewhere.

Instead, a better option might be mondo. I know nothing about it and 
can't comment on accessibility, but it looks like exactly what you want. 
I intend to look into it later. It's in Debian Etch but I don't know 
about Gentoo or live CDs. There is also a boot disk called mindi but 
again I don't know about accessibility. http://www.mondorescue.org/ If 
you try it, let me know how it works.