Re: [gentoo-user] back up gentoo system

[Volker Armin Hemmann <volker.armin.hemmann@tu-clausthal.de>]

On Mittwoch, 7. Mai 2008, David wrote:
> On Tuesday 06 May 2008 23:54:08 Andrew MacKenzie wrote:
> > +++ David [gentoo-user] [Tue, May 06, 2008 at 11:44:46PM +0200]:
> > >  Hi,
> > >
> > >    I was thinking on making regular backup of my gentoo partition. I'm
> > > not interested in incremental backups, just a mirror image of the root
> > > filesystem. I've prepared some scripts using dd for the first copy and
> > > rsync to keep it updated. How do you make your backups?
> > >  Any improvements?.
> >
> > I've used bacula in the past to do backups.  It's very full featured but
> > also rather complicated for simple backups.
> >
> > These days I use an rsync-based backup script I wrote called 'yarbs' (yet
> > another rsync backup system).
> >
> > It uses rsync and hard links to keep X days of backups.  Easy to use,
> > easy to recover from, easy to setup.  I can make it available if anyone's
> > interested.
> >
> > If you're using 'dd' does that mean you're copying the entire filesystem
> > and not just the files?  I believe that can run you into some issues if
> > the FS isn't read-only...
>
> What kind of issues? The idea is to copy the whole filesystem to another
> disk and keep it sync. And in case of "crisis" use dd from the backup to
> the original disk.

Andrew has a point. dd is not a good choice. FS don't like it if some parts of 
them are in a different state than others.

Also, with dd, everytime you restore, you also restore fragmentation - oh and 
a bigger partition? Can be tricky.

There is nothing wrong with tar. In fact tar is great for this job. dd not.
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