On Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:59:09 +1300 michael@actrix.gen.nz wrote:
If you are going to use rsynce consider that you may want to use some additional options to make the copy more faithful to the original...
rsync -a -H -A -X -S /from/ /to/
See the man page.
Before going to 12.1 I used rsync to duplicate / to a spare partition (I always leave make two OS partitions on every drive - can't have too many now that disk is cheap). I then manually edited /etc/fstab /boot/grub/menu.1st to make sure it would boot, that way I could boot the upgraded 12.1 or the old 11.4. Note this was in addition to offline backups (also using rsync). If you brought a machine down to runlevel 1 it would be reasonably safe to just rsync the live machine.
Hi Michael, Please don't 'top post' as reading (and posting) 'top to bottom' is the convention on this list. It's been my experience that the '-a' flag creates totally "faithful" archives (a.k.a. backups,) in the use case presented by the OP. What scenarios do you have in mind where the additional flags come into play? Is it 'normal' to find hard links in one's '/' or '/home' partitions? Ditto ACLs or extended attributes? Clearly the additional flags you've recommended have a purpose. But I have yet to encounter a failed restoration from the archives I've been creating. Have I just been lucky? ;-) Are there any potential drawbacks? TIA & regards, -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org