Dan Farrell wrote:
On Sat, 1 Mar 2008 02:04:31 -0500
"Ritesh Kumar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 8:23 PM, maxim wexler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Doesn't Ghost work with Ext3? What can I do to
recover my system without
reinstalling from scratch?
I've had success with #dd if=<partition-to-be-copied>
of=<partition-to-be-copied-to> bs=<varies>
Is there a reason why you backup the filesystem along with the data
on it? I do only minor backups... but even for anything major I would
use a tool like tar or rsync and drop the filesystem metadata
entirely.
Also directly reading from the block device is hazardous unless you
umount (or mount as readonly) the filesystem in question. This is
because, the filesystem may not keep all the data synced to the disk
at all points in time.
not that i'd recommend it for production systems, but you could mount
with the 'sync' option to help with this.
Even mounting sync is not safe, if you want to use dd for a backup then
boot from the live cd to backup everything. Otherwise using these
methods is risking a backup that once restored, does not work - not good
for the blood pressure...
If you want to back the system up while it is running (in particular /),
then you need to use a tool that understands how to create a backup
image that is valid (i.e will boot) - something like xfsdump, dumpe2fs
etc or smart tar/dump based tools like Amanda.
I would recommend using one of the dump tools for /boot, /, /usr, /var
*at least*. I've had the misfortune of helping many people restore their
broken Linux and Freebsd systems... and the only backups I've never had
issues with have been the *dump variety. They are a little unfriendly at
first, but they work.
regards
Mark
--
gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
