In openSuse… the practical way to backup with a GUI application.
a) Scenario: GRUB crashes or is modified/deleted… (Obviously not due to ME… I’m and expert even though I just installed OpenSuse 11.4… about 10 seconds ago… if you know what I mean).
b) Scenario: Installed/Updated SOMETHING and everything went weird… (can’t boot, nothing runs, KDE/GNOME is dead, end up at a command prompt but I don’t know any commands!!!)
Now I had an excellent OpenSuse running… WHAT do I download to backup, WHAT do I back up so I can do a FRESH Operating System install (SuSe) and restore the rest (or most of it).
SO:
1: What’s a good GUI tool?
2: What Folders and Files/Directories do you backup to get back running ASAP?
1 a GUI tool is something that gives you a GUI behind which a command line tool does the work
2.as you had everything working before, you should be able to do a fresh install during which openSUSE will ignore your /home folder. The only things you need to back up in this case are any mysql databases or other tweaks you have done outside /home which you can then copy back once the fresh install is complete. For absolute safety, you could back up /home but, unless there is a hardware problem, this should not be needed.
Note that all your personal settings and preferences are stored in /home; so none of these will be lost.
as john_hudson said it should be fine to re-install the system as long as your /home directory is on a seperate partition.
However what you’re asking for, that can restore a system completely to a state it was in before is ‘disk imaging’ software. This is very common in the Windows world (since re-installing Windows plus all your applications is usually extremely time consuming) is also used a fair bit in Linux…
You can either try a free open source program such as Clonezilla (Clonezilla - About) or try one of the many commercial products and see if it supports Linux (most support Linux partition types, not all may actually run on Linux).
Thank you for your replies. I didn’t know that /home would not be touched during a fresh install. Does the install program automatically leave /home untouched or does it prompt you?
It should automatically leave it alone, but only if it’s on another partition. If you’re not sure have a look at the output of the command ‘df’ (no quotes), or just post the output here and we’ll tell you.
There’s also a GUI partitioning program if you go into YAST and type ‘partitioner’, although just use that to look at the setup - don’t change anything unless you know what you’re doing
With “/home” on a separate partition, install has always defaulted to leaving “/home” untouched. But I can override that if I try hard.
Incidently, my personal idea of “true backup” is a command line backup that I can easily run while booted to a rescue CD or live CD. I currently use “tar” for that. I boot to a CD before making a backup (so that the files are idle). If I ever need to restore, I boot the CD, format and mount the partitions, then use “tar” to restore from the backup. Then I would have to reinstall grub to complete the restore.
On 2011-03-31 15:06, AlexMingo wrote:
>
> Thank you for your replies. I didn’t know that /home would not be
> touched during a fresh install. Does the install program automatically
> leave /home untouched or does it prompt you?
On a separate partition, yes - but always check for yourself. Read all the
messages, check all the screens.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
Clonezilla is not a gui tool, it is a text based program - but it is guided, and fulfills the ease-of-use requirement you are looking for - mostly. It was written by folks in Hong Kong or Singapore, not sure which, so there are translation and usage issues - but you can figure it out. It is a very good tool, and uses several command line techniques (including dd, which you should look up) to get you a hard drive image that can be restored. Clonezilla is a B+ recommendation in my book. I don’t have an A recommendation in this category. There used to be some commercial Windows tools that rated A (like ghost), but they were Windows/MSDos only. In some regards, clonezilla is superior to ghost.
Putting /home on a separate partition is a very good practice. Creating a separate /home while doing a fresh install is fairly easy. Changing an existing install to use a separate partition for /home is easy, but can be problem filled. Lots of places to mess up. And, the responder who said that your personal stuff was all stored there was about 95% correct. There are some things stored in other locations, like /usr/bin - but these locations are variable, and are less frequently used. Re-using “/home” will get almost all of what you normally recognize as “my settings”, and “my documents”, and “my data”.
