Re: [BackupPC-users] Bare-metal restore (Linux)

[Craig B. <cr...@at...>]

> The one thing I think you should clarify in the docs is the need for
> --one-file-system in the TarClientCmd if you want to be able to
> restore the root filesystem alone.  I think it should be in the default
> setup so you don't accidentally drag in CDROMs and other things
> that happen to be mounted, but surprises either way can be bad.

Yes, if you want to restore just a particular file system, then
you need to setup each file system as a different share and
then specify --one-file-system.  The problem is most people
won't bother to do this, and when they really need to do a
complete restore of a single file system then it is too late.

The alternative is to backup "/", but then you have to be careful
to put all the auto-mounts and other mounts in the exclude file
list.  And with this apprach you cannot restore just a single
file system.

I need to see if there are ways for rsync (and maybe even tar) to
save the device info, so you can later restore just a single
file system if you wish...

> It might also be good to come up with something you could run
> as a convention on the source machines to identify the partition sizes
> in the backups.  Something like 'fdisk -l >/etc/partitionsizes' on each
> machine would be helpful when you can't access the original drive.
> It would be even better to get it into the syntax that sfdisk needs
> for a scripted run but I'm not sure where that is documented.  

This is another good idea.  I guess I should work on a FAQ sometime...

Craig