[mythtv-users] Dedicated backend

[Simon Hobson]

Josu Lazkano wrote:

>I have a internal USB adapter, so I will add USB LiveCD to perform
>some partition backups. Is this a good idea?

My preference is to do file-level backups.

Doing partition level backups means two things :
1) You are (in this case) going to be shutting your system down for backups.

2) It makes restoring a single file harder than it needs to be, makes 
restoring to a different layout harder than it needs to be, and 
(almost certainly) takes more space.

Everyone has their own preferences, personally I prefer to backup the 
entire filesystem tree in one go to <wherever>. Eg "rysnc -avH 
--exclude=<some stuff> / <some destination>".

Restoring from that is a case of creating your partitions and 
filesystems as you want them for the restored system, mounting them, 
and copying all the files back. "grub-install" and your system is 
back and running.

Others prefer to do a filesystem by filesystem backup, eg :
rsync -avHx / <some destination>/
rsync -avHx /boot/ <some destination>/boot/
rsync -avHx /var/ <some destination>/var/
and so on.

The <some stuff> to exclude will ba all the non-disk filesystems (eg 
/dev, /proc) and I do them in a file (use --exclude-from), plus 
listing them as "/proc/*" means you still have the mountpoint in the 
backup.


<some destination> can be pretty much anywhere you like - a local 
disk, a disk on another machine, or a disk on a machine half way 
round the world if you have the bandwidth (rsync is very efficient - 
but don't forget what you'd need for a full restore).

-- 
Simon Hobson

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