Tips&Tricks How to backup or restore your system

[aru]

 

anon

Senior user

Joined: 01 May 2002

Posts: 558

 

Post Posted: Tue Jun 11, 2002 8:22 am Post subject: How to backup or restore your system

_________________________________________________________________

 

 

Made by Phazeman. 10 June 2002

 

DOCS/HOWTO A nice introduction to using one great utility. Mondo rescue can backup and restore your entire system from multiple media formats it supports. In this mini HOW-TO I will show you the basics of this very powerfull tool.

 

Mondo Rescue CDs creation Mini-HOWTO

 

Installation

 

Please install the needed packages (mondo and mindi must be installed) from here.

http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/download.html

 

Follow the installation instructions in here.

http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/download/layout.html

 

Backing up the system "On the Fly"

 

The execution of mondoarchive must be done with root user. First of all, you should find out what is the CDR device name in your system.

 

Run in console:

#cdrecord --scanbus

 

This will return you the list of all available drives in your system in next format:

 

scsibus0: 0,0,0 0) 'SAF' 'CD-RW4424A' '1.18' Removable CD-ROM

 

What you need are the first column data ('0,0,0' in current case). Here is an example how to run mondoarchive:

 

#mondoarchive -Oc 4 -s 700m d 0,0,0 -5 -E /mnt/windows -l LILO -f /dev/hda

 

where:

 

-Oc 4 - Create backup on a regular CDR media with x4 speed. For CDR/W use '-Ow'.

 

-s 700m - Use 700 MB media to write on.

 

d 0,0,0 - The device ID of your CD recorder.

 

-5 - The compression level the Mondo should compress the data with. The compression level can be between 1..9. 9 is the maximum compression

 

-E /mnt/windows - Specifies which directories on the HardDisk You want to exclude from the backup.

 

-l LILO - Specifies the Boot Manager of yours. LILO in this case

 

-f /dev/hda- Specifies the location of the boot manager ? on which drive it's installed. /dev/hda in this case

 

By default, the last 3 options are not needed. The Boot Manager and it's location should be found automatically.

 

Remember to put an empty CDR or CDRW media in the drive before starting the mondoarchive process. When next media will be needed you'll be prompted for replace the CDR or RW in the drive and type OK. The archives will be created in the directory where is the current user (must be root) located right now, so better CD (change dir) to

some big partition/drive of yours.

 

If any errors occurred during the backup procedure, please investigate the /var/log/mondo-archive.log

 

After the backup procedure finished, there are few directories left on your HD for further usage, but you can delete them if you are not planning to create the incremental backups. The /root folder contains the directory 'images'. The directory where the backup was executed contains another 2 directories named mondo* and mindi*.

 

Full Restore of the system

 

If you want to wipe everything and restore your whole system from CD, please boot from the first Mondo CD and press <enter>. Insert the subsequent CD's when asked. Watch the screen for errors. That's it.

 

If any errors occurred during the backup procedure, please investigate the /var/log/mondo-archive.log

 

If you want only partial restore of the system, you can follow the instruction in here for Interactive Restore, here for Expert Restore or here for Modified partitions - Restore to a different disk geometry.

 

Disclaimer: This process worked for me, I take no responsibly if your computer explodes.

 

Made by Phazeman. 10 June 2002

 

 

 

Editor's note: This thread was originally posted at the old MUB (Mandrake User Board at club-nihil). This post is the result of a 99% automatic backup, so due to its nature some text may be lost (improbable but possible).