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#1 2012-10-05 13:48:10

CyrIng
Member
From: France
Registered: 2010-07-17
Posts: 106
Website

About backing up / restoring Arch

Hi ,

My Arch X86_64 is installed onto a SSD, it's about 3 years old and I'm just moved to the mix systemd / sysV

My purpose is to refresh the perf of the SSD with a secure erase (hdparm), however I don't feel like reinstalling the whole Arch.

So I'm thinking about 2 solutions :

1- tar of the whole root fs; refresh SSD ; untar the root fs (included /etc)

2- tar /etc "only" ; brand new Arch install ;  untar /etc

( btw, /home is on another HDD )

3- a better way to save and restore all my Arch parameters ?

Thanks for you advices.

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#2 2012-10-05 13:58:04

DSpider
Member
From: Romania
Registered: 2009-08-23
Posts: 2,273

Re: About backing up / restoring Arch

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fu … with_rsync

If you don't have a Linux partition to move it to (so that the files don't lose their permissions), create a raw container on an NTFS partition (for example), format it as ext4 and transfer your system as per the instructions from here.

Last edited by DSpider (2012-10-05 13:59:25)


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#3 2012-10-05 14:07:25

CyrIng
Member
From: France
Registered: 2010-07-17
Posts: 106
Website

Re: About backing up / restoring Arch

DSpider wrote:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fu … with_rsync

If you don't have a Linux partition to move it to (so that the files don't lose their permissions), create a raw container on an NTFS partition (for example), format it as ext4 and transfer your system as per the instructions from here.

Really like this rsync script, thanks ;-)
I believe I can use a 4GB ext4fs on an USB thumb key as the destination folder

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#4 2012-10-05 14:27:52

bernarcher
Forum Fellow
From: Germany
Registered: 2009-02-17
Posts: 2,281

Re: About backing up / restoring Arch

Moving from Installation to Applications & Desktop Environments


To know or not to know ...
... the questions remain forever.

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#5 2012-10-05 17:01:05

blackout23
Member
Registered: 2011-11-16
Posts: 781

Re: About backing up / restoring Arch

I can recommend rsync aswell. I have not had to recover from my backup yet but creating it was very easy.  First I tried to back it up to my 1 TB NTFS drive but to no surprise it wasn't able to handle sym links if you just write the files to the partition not into a raw container. What works though if you have a small drive for your system (mine is 128 GB (Arch + Win7) and a big drive you can dd a zipped image of the system drive onto your NTFS drive from within the Live CD/USB enviroment.

Today I recieved an external case for 2.5" hard drives and installed my old laptop hdd (120GB) into it which I replaced with a 64 GB SSD about a year ago. Formated it with ext4 and now it holds the root dir of both my Arch PCs + both drive images. I use about 7 GB of my 64 GB and the zipped dd image came out at 5.1 GB while "dd if=/dev/sda of=/externaldrivemount/backup.img" would have resulted in a 64 GB file.

Last edited by blackout23 (2012-10-05 17:01:19)

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#6 2012-10-05 19:33:22

CyrIng
Member
From: France
Registered: 2010-07-17
Posts: 106
Website

Re: About backing up / restoring Arch

blackout23 wrote:

I can recommend rsync aswell. I have not had to recover from my backup yet but creating it was very easy.  First I tried to back it up to my 1 TB NTFS drive but to no surprise it wasn't able to handle sym links if you just write the files to the partition not into a raw container. What works though if you have a small drive for your system (mine is 128 GB (Arch + Win7) and a big drive you can dd a zipped image of the system drive onto your NTFS drive from within the Live CD/USB enviroment.

Today I recieved an external case for 2.5" hard drives and installed my old laptop hdd (120GB) into it which I replaced with a 64 GB SSD about a year ago. Formated it with ext4 and now it holds the root dir of both my Arch PCs + both drive images. I use about 7 GB of my 64 GB and the zipped dd image came out at 5.1 GB while "dd if=/dev/sda of=/externaldrivemount/backup.img" would have resulted in a 64 GB file.

Appreciate your advices
I'm not familiar with rsync but it looks like a way to handle my backup

I did once a plain backup using tar (none compress) starting from root + usr + lib + home + etc and even dev, excluding off course proc sys. The resulting big tar file was stored into HDD
Then I did a secure erase the SSD with Arch boot CD, with which I also re-parted aligned FS of the SSD
I then just had to untar backup from the mounted HDD
This has worked like a charm especially with a SSD with which I don't think it is good to use any dd command

However, taking into consideration the Time it requires to backup / restore vs install Arch from scratch with brand new features WELL installed. ie Systemd : I wonder if having just a tiny etc directory and some others parameters are not enough ?

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#7 2012-10-05 23:59:13

cfr
Member
From: Cymru
Registered: 2011-11-27
Posts: 7,131

Re: About backing up / restoring Arch

As far as I know, you will still get initscripts by default on a new install. I'm sure you can avoid this, but the standard setup will require you to switch to systemd later if that's what you want.

But it really all depends on just how customised your system is and the nature of those customisations. Nobody is going to be able to answer your question better than you... smile


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