I and relatively new to Linux and just came through a painful reinstall. Now I know in windows I can click on a restore point and this backs up the registry and state of the file system. Now its not so much the files I am worried about as it is the scripts that initialize the system. What happened before is I lost my KDE desktop and I sure hated to have to reinstall and go through all the upgrades.
Which files would I backup so that I could restore my environment on a failure. I want to do this before ever touching Xen again.
Now I know that you can upgrade from 13.1 to 13.1 and it should keep the newer files but here is a tale of caution. You must have at least 2x the space on / or what happens is you get forced to first delete files in / or the install wont run and if you change the partition size the files are trashed and then it is no longer an “upgrade”. T
On 2014-01-29 01:16, exponent wrote:
>
> I and relatively new to Linux and just came through a painful reinstall.
> Now I know in windows I can click on a restore point and this backs up
> the registry and state of the file system.
No such thing in Linux. Not even similar.
There is a feature, when using btrfs, where you can revert absolutely
every file to their status at some older point. It is not trivial to use.
> Which files would I backup so that I could restore my environment on a
> failure. I want to do this before ever touching Xen again.
ALL.
Well, basically, configs are under “/etc/”, but there are things all
over the place.
> Now I know that you can upgrade from 13.1 to 13.1 and it should keep the
> newer files but here is a tale of caution. You must have at least 2x the
> space on / or what happens is you get forced to first delete files in /
> or the install wont run and if you change the partition size the files
> are trashed and then it is no longer an “upgrade”. T
No, you are mistaken.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)
This is exactly what happened. I selected upgrade. The installation stopped and said there was not enough disk space on \ and that I could delete packages or delete files on . So I deleted some files and it went a little bit farther and then failed with exactly the same error (other than the amount of disk space it needed was smaller). So I went and deleted enough files to make free space and now update was no longer an option, I was not hallucinating. I know what I saw. Now I suppose I could have changed the partition size but to do this I would have to shrink the home partition and then I definitely run the risk of losing everything.
Yes I know about btrfs - not reliable enough to use for backup.
>
> This is exactly what happened. I selected upgrade.
How exactly? There are several system upgrade procedures.
You need a lot of space if you are doing an online system upgrade, with
download in advance, because the entire distribution has to be
downloaded again.
But that is not the only method.
> The installation
> stopped and said there was not enough disk space on \ and that I could
> delete packages or delete files on . So I deleted some files and it
> went a little bit farther and then failed with exactly the same error
> (other than the amount of disk space it needed was smaller).
But what files did you delete? Good grief, that can destroy a system!
Please, before doing such things ask here first. You are not experienced
enough in Linux to make those decisions.
> Yes I know about btrfs - not reliable enough to use for backup.
It is not for backup. It is a very advanced filesystem, which allows to
backout of any operation you do.
And no, I do not use btrfs.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)
Are you sure you are installing to the exact same place. The installer will tend to recommend installing to any free space you happen to have and that may not be enough
So it always important that you double check what the installer is planing on doing.
