Hi Per, On 21/08/14 17:04, Per Jessen wrote:
Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:
Hi,
I have a production system that runs OpenSuSe 11.2 that currently acts as a fileserver, mail gateway and workstation. This same production system is on older hardware and thus cannot boot from USB, but can from DVD/CD. The version of dd in Coreutils is 7.1.
My aim is to to upgrade this software to to the latest and greatest the hardware will allow, however before doing a fresh install, I need to preserve the user file and mail server stores i.e. non root users.
The entire system is under 2GB and given I have a a 2TB Drobo storage unit attached via USB that is owned by root, I assume this to be possible.
With the insertion of a Live CD to detect the system and attached USB connected drive array(Drobo), could I use dd to copy the system across and preserve all user permissions, users, groups etc?
Hylton, you will want to use tar or cpio, not dd.
Why do you say to not use dd? I figured that would be the easiest as it seems to be the most simple command. That said however, I do suppose though that using tar or cpio and having one entire file is easier to move around, although without compression, HORRIBLY LARGE. I have just double checked the size of /home directory and at 97GB, that is one MONSTER file so creating an archive is not advisable I would think. So I am not looking at creating and archive file, merely an exact replica to enable bare-metal restore, if necessary, that I can write to a USB attached HDD device of 2TB owned by root. I guess cp would work, but take AGES. My rsync version is 3.0.6 and SSH is not set-up so using rsync is apparently not possible, although given its a copy from a machine to a locally attached hdd, there is no security needed. Given its a local copy why is SSH a factor? So I'm stuck. How to not lose any data or set-up and configuration files but still do a fresh install of 13.1. Those set-up and config files I assume are in /etc and might be needed I'm thinking more and more of rsync but think I would need to possibly change the ownership of the locally attached USB hdd to the same user as whom I want to backup. Help! I'm open to suggestions to accomplish what I seek, if possible. Regards Hylton -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org