Arch Linux

synthead

Member

Registered: 2006-05-09

Posts: 1,337

Changing FS type ... backing up?

Ok, so I have Arch on my laptop right now, and after realizing through some chit chat with my friends that XFS wasn't a good FS choice, I wanna switch over to ext3 with some performance enhancers.  Sooo ... I archived my entire / partition last night excluding /proc and /dev using tar.  I used the cvzphf flags to keep permissions and some other things too.  My plan is to split this archive up with this information ...

http://www.cgi-interactive-uk.com/split … files.html

... burn it to cd, format (maybe even repartition to get a little windows in there, but that's another story), then use knoppix to mount the drive, rebuild the tar, and extract to /.

How does this sound?  Anything I missed?  Seems like a sound idea but I don't want to make a move this large without checking with you guys first

Thanks all!

pauldonnelly

Member

Registered: 2006-06-19

Posts: 776

Re: Changing FS type ... backing up?

It seems like using -h could be trouble, but I'm no expert. I'd probably just keep the config files I've changed, /home/*, and /usr/local/* myself.

user

Member

Registered: 2006-03-29

Posts: 465

Re: Changing FS type ... backing up?

boot with this http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page
and burn your hdd with partimage from sysresccd ( http://www.partimage.org/Download )

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I removed my sig, cause i select the flag, the flag often the target of enemy.

SAR brain-tumor
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tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: Changing FS type ... backing up?

From man tar:

       -h, --dereference
              don't dump symlinks; dump the files they point to

I'd have to agree with pauldonnelly - that's not good.

Apart from that, I'm sure the file-splitting will work fine, but it would make me nervous - the few times I've decided to do this, I've always had somewhere I can store and retrieve the entire tarball.

BTW, knoppix also provides partimage, if you decide to use it.

synthead

Member

Registered: 2006-05-09

Posts: 1,337

Re: Changing FS type ... backing up?

ah yeah good catch with the h flag!  I just copied the jumble of tags from a website about how to do this, turns out not to be so reliable eh?

My installaion has been doing some very bizzare things after some power failures with XFS, so I think I'm just going to save my important data then just reinstall.  There have even been a few times where my terminal would display garbled text  :shock:   Yeah, XFS on laptops is a huge no-no ...