ext2 dump / restore for Zaurus

[Don.Key]

I just finished reinstall of my SL-5500 on the basis of tkcrom with lots of tweaks and adjustments.

I would like to backup the current state of /home (it is on SD now), preferably with dump. Does anyone knows the source for precompiled ARM binaries of dump / restore?

(Of course the dd would be the alternative, but dump is more elegant concidering that I might want to use larger SD card once).

[rgrep]

Have you considered using tar instead?  I don't have any experience with dump/restore but GNU tar is much more advanced than some of the old Unix tar variants.  Tar is perfectly capable of taking a trustworthy snapshot of your ext2 filesystem, including all ownership and permissions of files and directories.

An example tar command line for backing up would be:

tar cvzf /mnt/card/home-backup.tar.gz /home

That would verbosely create a gzip-compressed file named '/mnt/card/home-backup.tar.gz' of the /home directory and all subdirectories.

If /home is a symlink to somewhere else you might want to specify /home/. instead of just /home to make sure it doesn't just copy the symlink itself.

If /home contains a lost+found directory then include --exclude lost+found before /home on the command-line.

Hope this helps.

[Don.Key]

Thanks rgrep,

Yes, tar is possible, but it is not really good as it might have problems to backup many important "special" files. I am not sure if /home contains some of those though.

I will try and see.

Regards

[rgrep]

Thanks rgrep,

Yes, tar is possible, but it is not really good as it might have problems to backup many important "special" files. I am not sure if /home contains some of those though.

I will try and see.

Regards

By "special" files do you mean device files?  GNU tar can store all types of special files (character and block devices, FIFOs and symlinks) as far as I am aware.