Arch Linux

Don Coyote

Member

From: Great Lakes Region

Registered: 2010-09-06

Posts: 109

Rescue Strategy

I'd like to try following the SSD wiki page by repartitioning my drive and also reinstalling Arch from scratch to become more familiar with the process. However my Thinkpad took quite a bit of custom configuration just to get to the point of a working system with a network connection, so just in case I run into problems and would like to get back to basic functionality quickish, I'd like to have a backup of the current sytem on flashdrive (don't have a CD/DVD) to revert to.

I'm not looking for a backup to my data, I do that already on a USB stick, just something to restore the configuration state that makes the laptop network functional. Looking at non-incremental backup programs I see that Fsarchiver is in extra. If I use this to backup my / partition (everything but /home) to a USB stick, and can get to a command line with another bootable USB installation stick, would I be able to restore the system from there? Would I need something like Clonezilla or Mondorescue to perform this? Is there another, better solution?

thisoldman

Member

From: Pittsburgh

Registered: 2009-04-25

Posts: 1,172

Re: Rescue Strategy

Fsarchiver worked for me when I switched to jfs from ext4.  I've only used fsarchiver to save the contents of an unmounted disk, never a mounted disk.  To save my root and var partitions I used fsarchiver from a live CD on a USB stick.  The boot, root and var partitions compressed to 2.2GB total on my machine.

Also look at this wiki page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sy … igurations.

You should be prepared to reinstall grub on the restored system, no matter what method you decide to use.

Last edited by thisoldman (2011-01-11 10:39:10)

Don Coyote

Member

From: Great Lakes Region

Registered: 2010-09-06

Posts: 109

Re: Rescue Strategy

So that System Restore from Configurations procedure creates a tar file of the entire system minus any specific files explicitly excluded? Sound like that is what I'll go with, but just to check, is there a program or established method that only backs up and restores files that have been added or changed from the core image at install?

thisoldman

Member

From: Pittsburgh

Registered: 2009-04-25

Posts: 1,172

Re: Rescue Strategy

...just to check, is there a program or established method that only backs up and restores files that have been added or changed from the core image at install?

There's a lot one can do with 'tar' but I haven't explored differential backups ('tar -g' or 'tar -d'?).