trinux-talk

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

[Riaan L. <ri...@ra...>]

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...

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

[P60 <akd...@ka...>]

> 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

Another perhaps easier method could be to use nc, as known as, netcat to do
such a job. It's in the netutils package. But it needs a working network
connection. And perhaps the dd program, It' in the fileutils package.
(There is also a netcat for NT)

From the nc info:

"Netcat can be used as a simple data transfer agent, and it doesn't really
matter which end is the listener and which end is the client -- input at one
side arrives at the other side as output.  It is helpful to start the
listener
at the receiving side with no timeout specified, and then give the sending
side
a small timeout.  That way the listener stays listening until you contact
it,
and after data stops flowing the client will time out, shut down, and take
the
listener with it.  Unless the intervening network is fraught with problems,
this should be completely reliable, and you can always increase the timeout.
A
typical example of something "rsh" is often used for: on one side,

 nc -l -p 1234 | uncompress -c | tar xvfp -

and then on the other side

 tar cfp - /some/dir | compress -c | nc -w 3 othermachine 1234

will transfer the contents of a directory from one machine to another,
without
having to worry about .rhosts files, user accounts, or inetd configurations
at either end.  Again, it matters not which is the listener or receiver; the
"tarring" machine could just as easily be running the listener instead.  One
could conceivably use a scheme like this for backups, by having cron-jobs
fire
up listeners and backup handlers [which can be restricted to specific
addresses
and ports between each other] and pipe "dump" or "tar" on one machine to "dd
of=/dev/tapedrive" on another as usual.  Since netcat returns a nonzero exit
status for a denied listener connection, scripts to handle such tasks could
easily log and reject connect attempts from third parties, and then retry.
"

Arne

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

[Timothy B. <tb...@ar...>]

Good idea.

tar used to be terrible about maintaining permissions, perhaps it has been 
fixed.  I use cpio because it has always done it right.

nc -l -p 1234 | uncompress -c | cpio -i
and
find . -print | cpio -o | compress -c | nc -w 3 othermachine 1234

also, with sub 500 MHZ machines, it runs faster without the compression.

ALSO, you cannot use this method to snapshot the root, while it is
running.  It might work, but it is not reliable.


On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, P60 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
> 
> Another perhaps easier method could be to use nc, as known as, netcat to do
> such a job. It's in the netutils package. But it needs a working network
> connection. And perhaps the dd program, It' in the fileutils package.
> (There is also a netcat for NT)
> 
> >From the nc info:
> 
> "Netcat can be used as a simple data transfer agent, and it doesn't really
> matter which end is the listener and which end is the client -- input at one
> side arrives at the other side as output.  It is helpful to start the
> listener
> at the receiving side with no timeout specified, and then give the sending
> side
> a small timeout.  That way the listener stays listening until you contact
> it,
> and after data stops flowing the client will time out, shut down, and take
> the
> listener with it.  Unless the intervening network is fraught with problems,
> this should be completely reliable, and you can always increase the timeout.
> A
> typical example of something "rsh" is often used for: on one side,
> 
>  nc -l -p 1234 | uncompress -c | tar xvfp -
> 
> and then on the other side
> 
>  tar cfp - /some/dir | compress -c | nc -w 3 othermachine 1234
> 
> will transfer the contents of a directory from one machine to another,
> without
> having to worry about .rhosts files, user accounts, or inetd configurations
> at either end.  Again, it matters not which is the listener or receiver; the
> "tarring" machine could just as easily be running the listener instead.  One
> could conceivably use a scheme like this for backups, by having cron-jobs
> fire
> up listeners and backup handlers [which can be restricted to specific
> addresses
> and ports between each other] and pipe "dump" or "tar" on one machine to "dd
> of=/dev/tapedrive" on another as usual.  Since netcat returns a nonzero exit
> status for a denied listener connection, scripts to handle such tasks could
> easily log and reject connect attempts from third parties, and then retry.
> "
> 
> Arne
> 
> 
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek
> Welcome to geek heaven.
> http://thinkgeek.com/sf
> _______________________________________________
> Trinux-talk mailing list
> Tri...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/trinux-talk
> 

-- 
--------------------
Timothy Burt
General Manager
Arbor Group LLC
Los Angeles, Calif. USA

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

[Riaan L. <ri...@ra...>]

I will definitely look at it but the problem is that I doing the restore
over a wan i.e. very low bandwidth.

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: P60 [mailto:akd...@ka...]
Sent: 02 October 2002 02:52
To: ri...@ra...; Trinux-Talk (E-mail)
Subject: Re: [Trinux-talk] Q - Timothy Burt - Backup or clone hard drive


> 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

Another perhaps easier method could be to use nc, as known as, netcat to do
such a job. It's in the netutils package. But it needs a working network
connection. And perhaps the dd program, It' in the fileutils package.
(There is also a netcat for NT)

From the nc info:

"Netcat can be used as a simple data transfer agent, and it doesn't really
matter which end is the listener and which end is the client -- input at one
side arrives at the other side as output.  It is helpful to start the
listener
at the receiving side with no timeout specified, and then give the sending
side
a small timeout.  That way the listener stays listening until you contact
it,
and after data stops flowing the client will time out, shut down, and take
the
listener with it.  Unless the intervening network is fraught with problems,
this should be completely reliable, and you can always increase the timeout.
A
typical example of something "rsh" is often used for: on one side,

 nc -l -p 1234 | uncompress -c | tar xvfp -

and then on the other side

 tar cfp - /some/dir | compress -c | nc -w 3 othermachine 1234

will transfer the contents of a directory from one machine to another,
without
having to worry about .rhosts files, user accounts, or inetd configurations
at either end.  Again, it matters not which is the listener or receiver; the
"tarring" machine could just as easily be running the listener instead.  One
could conceivably use a scheme like this for backups, by having cron-jobs
fire
up listeners and backup handlers [which can be restricted to specific
addresses
and ports between each other] and pipe "dump" or "tar" on one machine to "dd
of=/dev/tapedrive" on another as usual.  Since netcat returns a nonzero exit
status for a denied listener connection, scripts to handle such tasks could
easily log and reject connect attempts from third parties, and then retry.
"

Arne

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

[P60 <akd...@ka...>]

> I will definitely look at it but the problem is that I doing the restore
> over a wan i.e. very low bandwidth.
>
Thinking about 430 machines, walking around with a CD, will be more a
problem I guess. If you're handy on writing scripts, you could have each
machine that already has the Debian-stuff on it serving (with netcat again)
to the NT ones who you'll have to boot from the trinux netfloppy with a nice
little script in /tux/last. That way you'll only have to walk around once
with a single floppy. Then have a nap :-). The lower the bandwidth, the
longer the nap.

Arne

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

[Timothy B. <tb...@ar...>]

Better to mail them the floppy, with an ssh login configured.  Then you
can make adjustments, monitor progress and fix problems during the
upgrade.

And never leave your office. :-)

Always good for the outer offices to have, in case their machine won't
boot.  You can ssh into Trinux, and look at your disk, or what is left of
it.  Even fdisk and reformat it from the command line.  And overnight them
a new disk drive, if all else fails.  With Trinux, you can do the setup
from your chair.

Of course, with a script in /tux/last, it can become a brutally efficient 
Windows exterminator.

On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, P60 wrote:

> 
> 
> > I will definitely look at it but the problem is that I doing the restore
> > over a wan i.e. very low bandwidth.
> >
> Thinking about 430 machines, walking around with a CD, will be more a
> problem I guess. If you're handy on writing scripts, you could have each
> machine that already has the Debian-stuff on it serving (with netcat again)
> to the NT ones who you'll have to boot from the trinux netfloppy with a nice
> little script in /tux/last. That way you'll only have to walk around once
> with a single floppy. Then have a nap :-). The lower the bandwidth, the
> longer the nap.
> 
> Arne
> 
> 
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek
> Welcome to geek heaven.
> http://thinkgeek.com/sf
> _______________________________________________
> Trinux-talk mailing list
> Tri...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/trinux-talk
> 

-- 
--------------------
Timothy Burt
General Manager
Arbor Group LLC
Los Angeles, Calif. USA

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

[Riaan L. <ri...@ra...>]

Exactly what I am busy with. The stores where our software (winNT) is
curently running in are distributed all over South Africa, which is quit a
vast space.

The staff at the stores where these machines are in operation are also as
technically inclined as my cat, (ZERO). So I am busy building a script that
will autoexecute in Trinux (once the store manager has put the cd and floppy
in the machine and rebooted.). Then through the script
1.)delete one of the NTFS partitions on the Disk. (It currently has two
partitions, one 2GB and one 6GB) I have to preserve the 6Gb partition due to
the data contained on it. (Here I am still OK thanks to Timothy's cloning
article)
2.) reformat the /dev/hda so that Debian will run on it.  --> 50Mb /boot,
120Mb swap, 1200Mb / (Still no problems.)
3.) copy the root filesystem from a cd (due to the fact that I cannot use
the wan due to bandwidth constraints) onto the newly formatted disk. (Here I
am a bit out of my league with the, I folloed Timothy's cloning article but
the instead of sending it to a disk sent the data to a NFS share. The data
seems to cpio fine. It is only when I run chroot that I get the applet error
(I tried to reinstall the baselib.tgz but got;

"trinux> getpkg baselib
Retrieving http://172.30.166.8/riaan/baselib.tgz
Initializing baselib
-- Rebuilding ld.so.cache
Segmentation fault
trinux> chroot
chroot: applet not found"

4.) If I use the command "lilo -r /new" as per the cloning article I get " a
segment to large error"

once I go and use the lilo on the mounted filesystem /mnt/sbin/lilo -r
/mnt -C etc/lilo.conf -v -v -v it seems as though MBR is written to
5.) phone the store manager ask them to reboot the machines and have a
stable env. from where to run our system.

The above mentioned are just for those "listening to this thread to know
what I am trying to do. My questions however are:
1. Can I tar the filesystem that I have made a copy of put it on cd, untar
the tar onto the machine once the cd is in the machine at the store without
losing files or permissions. (I got very cool reply from Timothy and will
try it once I am back at work tomorrow morning (00:09 now) P.S. Timothy I am
not sure what other file system I can use other than ISO? Will the fact that
I tar the filesystem not solve my file permissions problems>

2.Is the whole Linux (Debian ) file system actually just a bunch of files in
a bunch of directories that will, once they are copied to another machine
act as it was cloned (varying sizes of the disk obviously excluded) or is
there underlying detail that stops me from just copying teh files over to a
new harddrive and expecting the machine to just boot up and act like the
master machine.

3. If the baselib package is installed at boot time but I still get chroot
applet errors after I reinstalled it: should I uninstall the baselibs (How?)
and try ad reinstall it romm scratch.

4. Once I get all this mess sorted out will everyone that helped me come for
a meal at my place (Cape Town SA --> sunny beaches nice girls and a lot of
sun?

Thanks.

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 10:54
To: P60
Cc: ri...@ra...; Trinux-Talk (E-mail)
Subject: Re: [Trinux-talk] Q - Timothy Burt - Backup or clone hard drive



Better to mail them the floppy, with an ssh login configured.  Then you
can make adjustments, monitor progress and fix problems during the
upgrade.

And never leave your office. :-)

Always good for the outer offices to have, in case their machine won't
boot.  You can ssh into Trinux, and look at your disk, or what is left of
it.  Even fdisk and reformat it from the command line.  And overnight them
a new disk drive, if all else fails.  With Trinux, you can do the setup
from your chair.

Of course, with a script in /tux/last, it can become a brutally efficient
Windows exterminator.

On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, P60 wrote:

>
>
> > I will definitely look at it but the problem is that I doing the restore
> > over a wan i.e. very low bandwidth.
> >
> Thinking about 430 machines, walking around with a CD, will be more a
> problem I guess. If you're handy on writing scripts, you could have each
> machine that already has the Debian-stuff on it serving (with netcat
again)
> to the NT ones who you'll have to boot from the trinux netfloppy with a
nice
> little script in /tux/last. That way you'll only have to walk around once
> with a single floppy. Then have a nap :-). The lower the bandwidth, the
> longer the nap.
>
> Arne
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek
> Welcome to geek heaven.
> http://thinkgeek.com/sf
> _______________________________________________
> Trinux-talk mailing list
> Tri...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/trinux-talk
>

--
--------------------
Timothy Burt
General Manager
Arbor Group LLC
Los Angeles, Calif. USA

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

[Timothy B. <tb...@ar...>]

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...
> 
> 
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek
> Welcome to geek heaven.
> http://thinkgeek.com/sf
> _______________________________________________
> Trinux-talk mailing list
> Tri...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/trinux-talk
> 

-- 
--------------------
Timothy Burt
General Manager
Arbor Group LLC
Los Angeles, Calif. USA

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

[Riaan L. <ri...@ra...>]

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...
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek
> Welcome to geek heaven.
> http://thinkgeek.com/sf
> _______________________________________________
> Trinux-talk mailing list
> Tri...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/trinux-talk
>

--
--------------------
Timothy Burt
General Manager
Arbor Group LLC
Los Angeles, Calif. USA

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...
> >