Restore

[Alexander Skwar]

Gabriel M Dragffy <dragffy at yandex.ru>:

> On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 16:59 +0200, Alexander Skwar wrote:
>> > Now my next question is how to restore them... I have 
>> > backups of the system mounts such as /, /usr, /var etc. Must I boot into
>> > another linux installation or can I somehow do it online?
>> 
>> It very much depends on what kind of restore you're talking
>> about. If you need to restore *everthing*, then yes, I'd suggest
>> to do this from some other distribution, as you might have 
>> problems overwriting certain files in / or /usr.
>> 
>> But if you just need to restore one file, then no, you don't
>> need another distribution. How did you make the backup? Into
>> a cpio/tar or with something like rsnapshot, which will, essentially,
>> just copy all the files over to some other directory?
> 
> I made backups using your advice - partimage!

Ah, okay. Sorry that I didn't remember ;)

> It seems to work well from 
> the command line but if you enter the GUI it makes a complete mess of
> listing available volumes.

Yeah, I know - quite bad :(

> Create a new LV called /dev/mapper/mainvg-newroot
> Restore the backup to this new LV. And then tell the system to
> use /mainvg-newroot as /.
> 
> Is this possible? 

Yes, but you'd need to reboot to make the LV newroot active. I'd do
it that way, that I'd restore and then change /boot/grub/menu.lst and
/newroot/etc/fstab accordingly. This also means, that I'd mount
/dev/mapper/mainvg-newroot to /newroot to do the change.

> Or what other options are there? 

If you've only got partimage backups, I'd think that this is your
only option. BTW: I'd do the restore from the running system. I
would NOT boot to a rescue system or something like this.

But if you're looking for other backup methods, I'd suggest
to have a look at rsnapshot, which uses rsync to create the
backup. The really neat thing about rsnapshot is, that you
don't need much space for a large number of backups. I read
a report, that a user had about 30 (or so) backups of the
whole system and this only required about twice the space
of *one* complete backup (so, if there were 10 GB of live/production
data, it would require 20 GB but he'd have the option to 
go back 30 "snapshots").

Alexander Skwar
-- 
   Gypsy robot: You want to die? 
   Bender: No, I wanna live! There's still too many things I don't own.