system restore for ubuntu -- few ideas.

Raphaël 'SurcouF' Bordet surcouf at debianfr.net
Wed May 18 19:21:57 UTC 2005


Le mercredi 18 mai 2005 à 12:28 -0400, Robert Jameson a écrit :
> I was thinking today about the possibility to make it so users can
> restore back to a previous state -- this could be done using some
> tracking information in dpkg and apt-get & synaptic.
> 
> How to handle backups? First you should be able to resolve the issue by
> running a program from your system -> administration -> menu

In my firm, I'm using mindi[1] and mondo[2] to generate a backup image
on CDRW (or CD-R, DVD-R, whatever) for our customers. So the basis can
will handle by theses software, for example. You need to install them
(using apt-get, aptitude or synaptic to install mondo package,
dependencies will comes) on the target host. There are somes contribs to
use it inside a cron[3].

> During the install of ubuntu -- you would ideally that if you wanted to
> allow full system restores -- if so. You will be presented with a option
> to add a extra partition and set the size for the restore space (IE:
> 2GB). 
> 
> This partition should remain umounted at all times unless doing a
> restore/backup and then it should umount. 

Nice idea.

> Optional: Add a entry in Grub menu.lst saying "System Restore" or
> something along those lines and make it boot off the system restore
> space and launch a gtk/qt program that starts the rollback process -- or
> even better make the live cd "detect system restore partition's" and
> when you run the livecd with a special boot command it starts up a
> restore program and walks the users through sometimes to repairing there
> desktop.

This option would be easy to do with an mindi image (about 24 Mb).

> This would be great for OEM's -- or anyone!  this is nothing new, most
> hardware vendors selling bundled computers including windows contain a
> hidden partition for restores -- I just thought this would mainly be
> useful for OEM providers to help relieve worries about selling computers
> bundled with ubuntu containing system restore. 

Why not. ;-)


[1]:http://packages.ubuntu.com/hoary/utils/mondo
[2]:http://packages.ubuntu.com/hoary/utils/mindi
[3]:http://cod.homelinux.org/C/documentation/mondo-with-cron/mondo-with-cron.html
-- 
Raphaël 'SurcouF' Bordet <surcouf at debianfr.net>






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