Hello forum,

I recently tried upgrading my laptop (Dell Inspiron 5150) from my nicely tweaked 9.2 to 10.0 and had nothing but trouble with it. So now I'm back with a fresh install of 9.2.

Now, before I installed 10.0, I copied everything on my laptop to my file server. I used rsync (as root) like so:



Now at this point those of you who have followed me so far probably know what my question is.

How do I get my backup restored?

I meant to use my backup to get my email, configuration files, & custom compiles back into 10.0, but now I want to get everything back. I also have my partitions setup differently now (& I'm using Reiser instead of ext3), so I realize I have to redo my fstab & bootloader. Here's what my general plan is:

1. Boot off of some Linux live cd (gentoo, etc.)
2. Mount my partions under /mnt/redo
3. Copy my backup into /mnt/redo
4. Fix /mnt/redo/etc/fstab to work with my new partitions (hmm - maybe I can just copy my current fstab?)
5. Fix /mnt/redo/etc/lilo.conf to work with my new partitions & run lilo
6. Reboot & pray

Anyone here have any tips or advice on doing something like this? Did I leave anything out?

Much thanks,
Chris

/bump for now...

I need to think about this...

To get the files back create a new dir on your laptop, lets say called /restore, and its in /home/chris/restore
Then from your Laptop as root, run rsync like this:

Note the space between the two slashes between source and destination.

Well, I got it working! I'm typing this from my restored 9.2 backup.

I did pretty much what I outlined above, but had some problems. Hopefully this will help someone else in the same situation.

The kernel couldn't find init because my / filesystem is now reiserfs instead of ext3. I figured out how to fix this - just run "mkinitrd" before running lilo. The only other problem I had was that I didn't use "--numeric-ids" when running rsync. (I have a "chris" user on my laptop as well as my file server, but they have different UIDs. A "chown -R --from=1001 chris *" from / fixed that.

So really, using rsync to do backups works great as long as you use --numeric-ids and don't change your partitions.

Chris