[mythtv-users] MythTV on Fedora 10 LVM backup/restore

[stan]

When a BIOS update was released for my Intel DG45FC mobo mythTV machine I
tried to see if RAID was now working.  My approach was to do a complete tar
backup of the mythtv system, install a new minimal Fedora system with the
new allocations I wanted, and restore the tar backup file over the new
minimal Fedora system (preserving the new allocations).

To do the test I did a tar backup of the entire system with

su
cd /
tar --create --file=/backup/root.tar.bz2 --one-file-system
--checkpoint=10000 --totals --preserve-permissions --xattrs --atime-preserve
--bzip2 --exclude=backup --exclude=proc --exclude=lost+found --exclude=mnt
--exclude=sys --exclude=boot .

Then I turned on RAID 0 and went to install a minimal Fedora 10 system to
allocate all the LVM stuff.  I discovered that Fedora didn't recognize the
BIOS defined RAID so I went back to a non-RAID system and again installed a
minimal Fedora 10 system to allocate all the LVM stuff (which had different
LV's and sizes from the original system).

Then I restored the original system over the new minimal Fedora system with

su
cd /
tar --extract --file=/backup/root.tar.bz2 --checkpoint=10000 --totals
--preserve-permissions --xattrs --bzip2 --exclude=etc/fstab
--exclude=etc/lvm --exclude=dev/VolGroup00 --exclude=dev/mapper  .

(The tar backup and restore was done in a standalone mode by booting the
Fedora repair system from a CD.)

The system basically works, but I had a "freeze" today.

Are there other files and directories I should have excluded during the
restore?  I'd like to leave all the allocation and LVM stuff alone during
the restore.

It seems backing up a system from a logical volume and restoring to a newly
allocated logical volume should be a common operation, but I can't find any
information that seems to work.  I need a "restore everything but allocation
information" operation.

How is everyone backing up their LVM MythTV systems?

--stan