Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Examples for whole-system backup

[Leland Best]

Think I accidentally sent this directly to Ricky directly.  Hopefully,
this will get to the list instead.  My apologies if I wind up double
posting.

Ricky,

On Thu, 2015-04-09 at 17:50 -0700, Ricky Huang wrote:
> 
> > On Apr 9, 2015, at 4:36 PM, Leland Best <address@hidden> wrote:
> > 
> > All,
> > 
> > Just thought I'd throw my $0.02 in …
> 
> 
> This is exactly what I was looking for.  Your two-cents have helped
> immensely!

Glad to be of help although you should, of course, carefully evaluate
whether it meets your needs.

[...]
> > To restore to a new machine/drive I boot it with a
> > Debian Live DVD (or USB stick or whatever), restore root and boot,
> > reboot with a GRUB rescue CD and boot the restored root system in
> > single
> > user as 'root', restore everything else, and finally install GRUB in
> > the
> > MBR.  One tip though.  I backup root and boot with
> > --preserve-numerical-ids because the user/group mappings are
> > invariably
> > different on the Live DVD.
> > 
> 
> 
> When you use terms “restore” above, you meant “rdiff-backup -r”
> command, correct?

Yes.  Typically I do something like:

live# rdiff-backup -v 5 -r now --force --preserve-numerical-ids
address@hidden::/backup/my_net/my_host/root /new_root_mountpoint 2>&1
| tee /path/to/root_restore.log

all on one line obviously.  The '--force' option is necessary because
rdiff-backup gets (justifiably) nervous about restoring over an existing
directory.  In this case though this is exactly what we want.

>   So that also meant your Live DVD / USB contains the rdiff-backup
> tool?
[...]

Actually no, although there may be other Linux live/rescue CD/DVDs out
there that do.  But the Debian Live DVD does contain 'synaptic' so it's
trivial to install rdiff-backup once you've booted.  Obviously, for the
Live DVD this will _not_ be persistent (i.e. you have to re-install
rdiff-backup every time you boot the Live DVD).  That's why I've moved
to USB sticks.  I can even upgrade a USB stick to 'testing' or whatever.
Of course, if your hardware won't boot from USB then you're sort-of
stuck. :(

Hmm.  IIRC, once a long time ago, I did the whole 'boot the live DVD,
restore root and boot' thing but instead of rebooting with a GRUB rescue
CD, I then did a 'chroot' to the new (restored) root and restored
everything else.  I _think_ I even installed GRUB on the new root
drive's MBR from there.  On reboot, presto(!), I had a fully restored
bootable system.  But as I said, that was a long time ago and I really
don't remember the details or whether it really worked like that.  The
field of Experimental System Administration!  Fun if you have the time.
Otherwise, as many others have said, though it absolutely _can_ be used
to restore to bare metal, rdiff-backup may not be your best choice.

Good luck whatever path you take!

Cheers