<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 7:42 PM, Gene Czarcinski <<a href="mailto:gene@czarc.net">gene@czarc.net</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> In the past, I have always assumed that I would simply re-install if I lost my root partition and only did backups for data partitions and home. My systems are configured to have a boot partition, a root ("/") partition, a /home partition, and other "my data" partitions. While I use LVM for my data partitons, I have been using a regular disk partition for root. In the past I have used partimage (and now partimage-ng) to backup disk partitions but these programs do not work with LVM logical volumes. Before I commit to putting my root partition on an LVM logical volume, I thought I would like to try backing it up ... I have tried using dump/restore and tar ... oh, backup/save seems to work just fine (no error message) but restore/tar -x is NOT working. Using restore, I get some selinux errors but not with tar -x. However, in both cases, when I try to boot the system, I am getting errors such as not finding /dev/root, /proc, etc. Has anyone ever done a backup of the root partition? What program did you use? Have you tried to restore and did it work? [or did you just trust that it would?] I did my testing using vmware virtuals but that should not matter. I installed a"default" F9 installation with /boot and swap on the first scsi virtual disk and "/" on a second scsi virtual disk in an LVM logical volume. This system boots and runs just fine. I first tried running from the built system by running dump against an LVM snapshot of the root partition. In another virtual, bootup the F9 install in Rescue mode, restore the /boot and swap partitions to the first disk, create an LVM partition on the second disk and use pvcreate and vgcfgrestore to setup to system to match the original one. Use restore (lots of selinux errors) and try booting ... fails as describe above. Next, I booted the F9 install cd in Rescue Mode and did the dump "standalone" ... the repeated as above with the same result. Next, use tar --xattrs -vpzcf to create my backup and try again .. save result but the tar restore has only a few warning ... but the system does not boot. Help! I have not lost anything yet but it sure would be nice to know that a root partition can be backed up with something better that just using "dd" to create a bit-by-bit image. BTW, I am interested in an open source solution only ... I am not considering commercial products. <a href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list" target="_blank"></a></blockquote><div> Once I successfully restored the / partition using tar. But it was not mounted. I booted from a second disk. If I remember well, the problem with the exclude clause in tar is that it suppresses any path containing the string. For instance, if one excludes tmp, /var/tmp will not be backed up also, not only /tmp. After restoring, I just created by hand the directories I excluded (proc and mnt) Again, without the partition being mounted. tar cvpzf /home/temp/backup.tgz \ --exclude=proc \ --exclude=lost+found \ --exclude=mnt \ ./* </div></div> -- Paulo Roma Cavalcanti LCG - UFRJ