I am getting enough data on my openSUSE 11.0 machine to need to consider backing it up.
Exactly what does the YaST System Backup save? Will I be able to restore my system (heaven forbid) using it alone or will I need it plus the original installation DVD?
In other words, is the YaST manual System Backup adequate for most average users or is something more sophisticated recommended?
The wizard asks for a path to the backup file. Where should I put it? What is standard?
How do more experienced users handle backups on a desktop machine?
Thank you for the information. For now, I think I will stick to “OK”, but I did make a note of the link you provided to investigate later when I am more comfortable with the basics of openSUSE.
For the time being, my goal is to learn to make full use of the things openSUSE provides out of the box. That learning curve is steep enough to keep my feeble mind occupied for now. Once I get a fully functional machine and am comfortable relying on it for everyday use, then I can start looking for better and best ways to do things.
Would it be appropriate to provide a path to a USB flash dirve for the manual backup?
What gets backed up and what does not?
Can I restore from this backup alone or will I need the installation DVD to get running after a crash?
The YaST Backup creates a tar or equiv archive file with the contents of the entire system. Go into the app module and you’ll see the options and there is Help documentation with it. I haven’t used it, so I can’t reply re what kind of filtering it allows; I suspect not much if any.
As far as a USB drive, yes; appears so if mounted. You’ll see a place to indicate where the interim temporary tar files are created, as well as the fully-qualified file name of the tar archive - that would be your USB device. Note that with portable storage SuSE will automatically designate a mount point (I think under /media), and will attempt to re-use that later for the same device. The question is whether what is mounted there will get included in the backup, which you would not want (of course, if the device is empty, not an issue).
I suggest you open YaST Software Management and search on “backup” adding “description” to the fields searched. You’ll see a range of possibilities, from the very simple to industrial-strength. If you add the Packman repository (you probably already have, for multi-media), there is an app named “dargui” which is a gui front-end to the powerful dar utility. This may be much more suitable for what you want to do.
First, a correction: I played around a bit with the YaST Backup utility, and discovered that you can in fact filter the contents. The utility is setup as a wizard, so you can’t see all of what it can do/how it does it without going through the process. I suggest you do that several times as tests; I think most of your questions will be answered that route (there are brief help links on each screen).
I don’t know the answer re the xml file. Again, testing the process may yield the answer, ableit indirectly. A tar has its own archive file index, but there could be reasons to store a catalog of sorts externally. (Windows XP’s backup utility does this, for example.)
To restore, you use the YaST System Restore utility (and that may be where the xml file is utilized). How any backup/restore works (or fails to) is a consequence of its design plus the particular recovery situation. For example, Windows XP’s “emergency recovery” requires the machine have a floppy drive and that a recovery control file was written to the floppy as part of the backup. The YaST Restore gui utility is apparently designed for use only when openSUSE can be run (there is a DOS-gui counterpart of every YaST module which can be run from the DVD Rescue System command line; this is an “advanced” use of the system). So, could you restore from external storage or from optical media - yes, if the system is bootable and the partitions can be mounted. Actually, a tar archive can be re-written to a mounted partition from just about any linux bootable CD/DVD. “Bare-metal” recovery (e.g., a replaced hard disk) as a rule requires more sophisticated tools and advanced skills; only the individual user can decide what is best for him/herself. For all these reasons and others, the backup/recovery tools included with an OS (any OS) are always quite basic and definitely have limitations - and this is why there are so many alternatives, free and commercial, using any number of different technologies and techniques. Google will return a huge amount of information. Personally, I like the dar tool (dar-gui is just the grapical interface; the backup files can be accessed via dar directly from the command line). Fundamental to any robust backup/recovery solution is the ability to do so if the OS is inaccessible, and better yet, can even handle broken partitions and associated issues. In Windows-land, this is what the XP Recovery Console or the Vista Recovery Environment (both off the retail CD/DVD) are designed for, although those are limited. So complimenting the backup/recovery solution is independent bootable tools; with linux, you can get a whole OS and a wealth of tools all on one CD or DVD. Here are a few links to look at:
Thank you. With your help, I feel confident that I can just save the Tar Archive to CD and probably get what I need if I crash.
I opened the xml file. It appears to be some information about keyboard settings (language,layout, num lock, cap lock etc). If this was Windows, I’d think it was part of the registry. I think I’ll just ignore it when I move the Tar Archive to permanent optical storage.
Next on my to-learn list is setting up a HP OfficeJet 7110 printer/scanner/fax and setting up Samba Client to get on my little household Windows peer-to-peer LAN. I’ll probably be bugging the people on the Hardware and Network forums instead of the kind people here.
Coincidentally, this page appeared today. The title is 21 of the best free linux backup software.
I use Simple Backup Solution which is just a GUI for some linux command line tools. Also of interest is Clonezilla which does a bare-metal restore. I haven’t tried that one yet.
One of the apps I could not remember nor find, was listed in the article @Prexy cited. It’s “Keep” (if you’re using KDE), a simple gui for the excellent rdiff-backup as the backend. Rdiff-backup is built atop the superb rysnc, and adds incremental/differential backups. Worth a look.
I have been looking at Yast System backup and cannot understand it, despite having read the Wiki on it at YaST/Modules/System Backup - openSUSE. So I came to the Forum (nothing funny happened on the way) and found this thread.
So I did a test backup of my entire system, telling it to split the archive into CD size(700MB) chunks. It chuntered away for a couple of hours and eventually produced seven tar files, total size 4.4 GB, yes 4.4 GB.
Now my total system is about 4 GB, it is supposed to be zipped and it says it does not include unchanged package files (ie most of them). So how come it’s so big ??
Then I burnt the first tar file and the xml to a CD, then used Yast System restore to restore from this CD. It ran the CD for about five minutes, then said “Cannot read the Archive file - this is not a tar file”.
So Yast wrote the Tar file, but Yast can’t read it. What’s going on ?
Does anyone out there know enough about this backup system to explain what is going on ? With respect to all the previous postings, I get the impression that no-one here is very knowledgeable on the subject.
BTW Ark could not read any of the archive files either.
Don’t know if this is what’s happening with you, but when I (ages ago) did a trial run of Yast’s system backup tool, telling it to create a backup of my root partition, it also tried to include every other partition that was mounted at the time
I have partitions with mounts like /backups & /shares and there didn’t seem to be any way of excluding them … at least not one that worked
Kbackup I find is great for the sort of backup you would use if you could boot into suse or have freshly reinstalled it and don’t wanna go through configuring everything from scratch again
Clonezilla is excellent for creating images of drives and partitions, similar to ghost for windows, it can even resintall your bootloader
But there’s another tool that I’ve not seen anyone mention that can often get your system up and running again if something’s happened to render it unbootable, although it isn’t a backup tool but a system repair one and comes on the suse dvd
When you boot off the dvd on the first menu you get a system repair option, ignore that one and proceed as if you’re going to install suse until you get to the screen where you are asked whether you want to do an install or upgrade
There is a third option underneath called something like Repair Installed System, I’ve used it successfully to get the system back up and running without even needing to refer to any of my backups several times
Does take a while to run especially if you use the automatic repair function in it which scans everything including filesystem errors on every partition, but I have found it to be a very handy tool
The benefit being that because it’s not restoring any files which may be out of date with regards to any changes you’ve made since backing up, if it does manage to fix whatever your problem is, you’re almost certainly booting back into a system that’s configured exactly as it was before it ‘went down’
Had the same problem and even worse: being confronted with a real disaster recovery, not only for test purposes…
Finally I got it: it seem’s that the YaST System Backup recovery part isn’t prepared for the case you want to recover from multi volume archive. You first have to rejoin the volumes to a single *.tar.
Extract contents of multi volume tar:
tar -x -M --file=01_backup.tar --file=02_backup.tar …
Then make a new big tar:
tar -cvf backup.tar [extracted tar contents]
Perhaps thats a bug that has been solved beyond 11.0…
Hmm… Perhaps it works like zip or old rar that would ask you to insert the last disk first, as this was the one with the multi-volume index? Or maybe the xml file has some info on this, and has to be in the backup CD too? Just guessing.
I think the xml file could be the state of installed packages like the file You get when doing yast->package management->file->export. OP could do this and compare the two files. Of course it’s just a guess as I haven’t ever used the yast backup feature.
I have a NAS storage RAID unit (a DNS-343) and it’s easy to find in smb:/ and using dolphin - but I am not sure how to reach it as part of my normal filesystem. I would like to be able to use kdirstat and YaST Backup with this NAS as the target - but these only seem to “see” the normal directory tree. Is there a secret mounting location or do I need to use **smbmount **to mount it somewhere?
Ah - answered my own question:
> mkdir /RAID
> mount -t cifs //192.168.n.n /RAID
Presto! Way better than smb:/ … bit we will see if openSUSE likes this way of accessing my raid!
EDIT: Oops - spoke too soon. It looks like permissions are handled in an odd way. Not
sure this will work since I want to use YaST backup to “safely” store backups (i.e., with
proper ownership to preclude prying eyes).
I think you ran these commands as admin.
mkdir /RAID
mount -t cifs //192.168.n.n /RAID
I think you should add this command in between chown -R your_user:your_group /RAID
but first check the rights on the /RAID directory.
