Re: [Trinux-talk] Q - Timothy Burt - Backup or clone hard drive

[Matthew F. <mf...@ci...>]

Ok. Sorry. Somebody asked about this a while back. I added /bin/chroot to
the baselib.tgz.

It should be available at:

http://trinux.sf.net/pkg/baselib.tgz
http://devel.trinux.org/pkg/baselib.tgz

The latest floppy snapshots (and the ISOs) shouldn't even give you that
error?

The next time I rebuild the initrd I'll either add the busybox applet or
the chroot binary, but baselib.tgz should get you by for now.

- mdf


> Could someone please tell me in which package "chroot" is.
> 
> When I run chroot I get --> an applet error.
> 
> Riaan Labuschagne
> e-mail: ri...@ra...
> +27 83 4444148
> +27 21 982 2223
> +27 21 982 2225 (fax)
> Visit http://www.radioretail.co.za
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Timothy Burt [mailto:tb...@ar...]
> Sent: 02 October 2002 06:20
> To: Riaan Labuschagne
> Cc: Trinux-Talk (E-mail)
> Subject: Re: [Trinux-talk] Q - Timothy Burt - Backup or clone hard drive
> 
> 
> 
> The CD creation process currently separates the "building of the iso
> filesystem" from the "burning of the cd".  This is because the
> building of the iso usually impacts the burn, and the burn can fail due to
> the pipeline becoming empty, or because of cpu/disk load gets too high.
> 
> So, you need to perform your backup to cd in two phases.  The creation of
> the iso filesystem from the current disk (creating an image), and then
> burn the image to CD.  You can burn the image to CD with any OS, including
> windows.  The task is to create the image.
> 
> Ideally, you want the image created from a quiet filesystem, not one that
> is the root of a running multi-user mode UNIX.  I have accomplished this
> by running in single user mode, but this failed for some reason on some
> recent RH releases, so I now mount the filesystem to be backed up on the
> /mnt of a running OS.  And I use Trinux as the running OS, on which to
> mount my filesystem.
> 
> With the hard disk mounted on /mnt, the challange now becomes where to put
> the data that gets dumped into the image file.  Ideally, this should be on
> a filesystem other than the filesystem that is being backed up.  Although
> with some effort, you might be able to create your image and skip the
> image file itself.  See below.
> 
> In my previous description, this problem was solved by physically mounting
> the new disk onto the controller.  Mount them both, and copy from one to
> the other.  But in this scenario, we do not have a new disk to use,
> because we are building an ISO that we can later burn to a CD.
> 
> Some options you may have available include:
> 
> 1) attach a spare hard disk, and build your iso on it.
> 2) use an nfs mounted filesystem, but could be really slow.
> 3) use a modified buildiso command (find |grep -v isofilename.iso |
> mkisofs) that strips out the iso filename.
> 
> Which choice may depend on your resources and the speed with which you
> need to accomplish the task...
> 
> If the machine is an internet server, then you want this to happen fast,
> so I would suggest option 1 (or 3).  A permanently mounted extra
> filesystem would be ideal.  You may need to go single user, while the
> backup happens, but this could be for as little as a minute or two.  Or up
> to 30 YMMV.
> 
> If it is an internal office server that is totally quiet and unused at
> times of the day, then you could easily use option 2, as often as you
> like.
> 
> Of Course....  Once you have a copy of your root filesystem imaged onto
> the CD, then it is a simple task to boot from Trinux, mount the hard disk,
> and mount the cd and do a find . -print | cpio -pmduv /mnt/harddisk..
> Sometimes you need a quick lilo to make it boot.
> 
> This is an excellent mechanism for preserving the state of a known good
> running machine.  It can be done on a regular basis, and efficiently
> stored off site.  It might also be accomplished nightly.  I highly
> recommend it.
> 
> FINAL HINT -- I haven't ever done what is described, so I don't have the
> exact commands, but it should work.  Also, you might also consider burning
> an image to the CD that is NOT ISO, but a more Unix friendly FS.  This may
> help preserve ownership and perms issues, if you encounter any.  ISO, as a
> standard, does not preserve UNIX perms. (correct me if I am wrong, please)
> 
> On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, Riaan Labuschagne wrote:
> 
> >
> > Timothy,
> > I refer to your "clone hard drive" howto you wrote.
> >
> > Is there a way that I can tar the contents of a backed up disc, copy it to
> > cd, untar it on a partition on the new hard drive and restore the disc,
> > whilts keeping the permissions etc?
> >
> > I AM NOT LOOKING for a howto, just some pointers please.
> >
> > Thanks
> > Riaan Labuschagne
> >
> > P.S. Trinux is helping my business www.radioretail.co.za a hell of allot.
> I
> > am in the process of upgrading 430 WinNT machines   to  Debian without any
> > human intervention. (no keyboard , mouse or screens on the machines.)
> >
> > ri...@ra...
> >