How to recover using a full backup?

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Sep 03, 2018 at 05:39:22PM +0200, Volker Wysk wrote:
> Am Montag, 3. September 2018, 10:33:20 CEST schrieb Colin Watson:
> > You may want to make a backup of the disk's partition table structure,
> > e.g. using sfdisk.  You can just leave this in a file that gets backed
> > up along with the rest of the system.  Check that you have nothing in
> > other partitions that you can't reconstruct.
> 
> What would one do with the disk's partition table structure..?

If you need to restore to a new disk, you're going to want to put some
kind of partition table on it first.  It may not be identical to the old
one, especially if the disk is a different size, but you'll probably at
least want the old table as a reference unless it's extremely simple and
memorable.

I normally work on the assumption that a restore may be happening in a
somewhat stressful situation (failed hardware and you need to get the
machine working again), and so it's a good idea to minimise the amount
of thinking I need to do.

> >   grub-install [possibly with suitable arguments]
> 
> This should be "grub-install /dev/sda".

Yes, though bear in mind that if you've booted from a USB stick then
it's not entirely impossible that the USB stick will be /dev/sda.  I
always check first in that sort of situation, e.g. using "udevadm info".

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]