Once More Thread About Backup Strategies

[daniel3000]

Hello,

frinally I was able to clone my SL-C3000 setup completely onto a second machine, so now in theroy I know how to _completely_ backup the device and restore it.

However, to lower the efforts needed for a backup (i.e. in order to make it possible to myself to run backups more often), I'm looking for a way to automate it.

What I did:

* Used the built-in backup/restore to backup the SL-C3000 (all but /dev/hda3) onto an SD card (it boots into simgle-user mode in order to make clean backups of hdd1 and hdd2 and probably /home etc.)
* used tar to back up important directories of /dev/hda3 (leaving out video / mp3 files, as they are not important) onto SD


Then I prepared the "backup" (i.e. second) unit:

* Flashed Cacko ROM per instructions
* used built-in backup/restore to restore the backup
* untarred the hdd3 stuff
* rebooted.

--> Now I have a perfect clone of the first device. And so I know in case of a hardware failure I do not have to spend too much time for getting up and running agian.

But the backup procedure is somewhat clumsy. I can put the hdd3 backup stuff into a script which I can call when going to bed.

Now I'm interested in what exactly the built-in backup appliactoin does, so I can baybe also control that from a script. If it is only a wrapper for some commands, it could be done maybe.
The most complicated part is probably the single-user-mode switch,. since an "init 1" will probably kill the script. But OTOH the built-in applications also must survive somehow.
Has anyone looked deeper into this already?

---

Also it would be great to be able to create a CF/SD card with everything onboard to completely recover from a crash, i.e. the Cacko flash files AND the backups. Maybe even restore the complete backups (hdd3 and the other backup) directly from the Cacko installer scripts, so just pop in the card, co through some Japanese menues as Cacko docs describe, and have EVERYTHING back running in half an hour).

Is it correct that the Cacko flash files MUST be on a FAT partition? My SD is ext2, so I cannot do it without swapping cards or having some trouble with multiple partitions on the card.
For the backups created with the internal backup application, it doesn't matter which fs type it stores its stuff on, does it?

Any ideas?

Thanks
daniel

[Jondalar]

Hey Daniel,

nice idea so far .. I wasn't checking into this too deeply as I probably installed 50 times in the last 8 month (playing around too much with OE).

However,  I am flashing using a CF-Card with DOS or an SD-Card with ext2 - both works fine. So, I assume it should work for you also. HDD3 stays not touched anyways when flashing back, right?

Question - which options did you use to backup the sections in the sharp menu (I guess you mean the Japanese one, right?) .. ?

Cheers,
J*

[daniel3000]

However,  I am flashing using a CF-Card with DOS or an SD-Card with ext2 - both works fine. So, I assume it should work for you also. HDD3 stays not touched anyways when flashing back, right?

Question - which options did you use to backup the sections in the sharp menu (I guess you mean the Japanese one, right?) .. ?
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Great. Will try it with the ext2 SD and the flash files.

However, I do not understand your question...
I did not use the Sharp menues to back up, but I used the built-in backup / Restore aplicatoin which is placen in the Settings tab. Does that answer your question?



Another issue I have now:
Every attempt to "restore" using that Backup Restore app mentioned above results in a "Restored failed" message if the progress bar hits 100%.
Investigating a bit (comparing the contents of the original and restored /hdd2 - the latter has 10MB less contents!, and doing a gtar -tvf on the backup file) shows that the backup file seems to be corrupt ("unexpected EOF").
However, the backup routine did not give me any error message.

One more reason to know what exactly the backup routine really does!

daniel