Quoting IEEE alias <jeff.taylor@ieee.org>:
I am planning on a clean install (going from 13.1 to 42.2 Beta) on the root partition, leaving the home partition alone. I'm not doing complete backups because of limited space on the backup drive. I've room for a single full backup, both partitions. What is a reliable way?
"cp -a / /media/LinuxBackup/full" is what occurs to me. Is there a better way?
Thanks to all who weighed in. Backup may have been misleading. This is a one time snapshot, archive, whatever. No updates, so rsync's incremental and/or differential backup space saving isn't needed and won't be used. Rsync has other features that look useful, e.g. "rsync -x" for each disk partition. That way /proc and other virtual filesystems won't be copied. The backup drive has space to do a complete image of the hard drive. However, I'm going to change partition sizes so that's not desireable. One person's comment about making a copy of the MBR set me to thinking. The only scenario where I might need to restore the MBR is if the clean install goes totally awry. I don't think it likely, but would probably do a clean install of 13.1 in that case. An archiver (tar = tape archiver) and a compression utility add complexity and additional failure modes to no benefit that I can see. This needs to be done once, correctly, so simplicity is key. Booting from a Live CD or rescue disk looks like a very good idea. Moving the dot files in home directories also looks like a good idea. It's more work to merge them, but avoids sticking with archaic formats. RPM is good about making copies of system programs, but user configurations are a crap shoot. I've been bitten by this in the past and had forgotten. The whole point of this exercise is to not exclude any file. Often some vital file has moved from where it was being backed up to a directory where it wasn't. I have backups with every file I think is important, but I thought so several times in the past and have been proven wrong. Thanks to all, Jeffrey -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org