On 01/21/2016 12:03 PM, don fisher wrote:

On 01/20/2016 06:55 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:

...

On Sun, Jan 17, 2016, 10:56 AM don fisher <hdf3@comcast.net <mailto:hdf3@comcast.net>> wrote:

I the opening email I indicated that I wanted to reproduce the btrfs file system provided by the distribution media. I wish to create a bootable backup on a USB drive, and require THAT file system.

Ahhh. Very important question. Difficult answer. Big problem is the expectation the bootable backup should be the same as the installed layout. Even the idea the filesystem should be the same is open to debate.

Per usual, on Linux, there are many possibilities. And it depends on distribution behavior.

For example, openSUSE by default uses snapper to take snapshots of the filesystem very frequently. It does not make sense to create a bootable backup with all of these snapshots.

But how to do even a non-bootable backup that retains all snapshots is unanswered. Even whether the effort to keep all snapshots in any backup is unanswered

The functionality exists to do this. But user source tools are limited. About the most complete is to make rootfs a seed device, add a 2nd device, then delete seed device. This causes seed to be used as source, and 2nd device becomes independent copy. And it's own volume UUID.

But it's not bootable yet. That requires GRUB work. And GRUB work depends on firmware, BIOS vs UEFI. See?

Difficult problem.

That is what I was requesting. I have tried to RTFM and have not found the information that I require, so I will go back to using the distribution media to generate a file system on my USB drive.

This is not your deficiency. The rule are not mature. They are not mature because we don't even clearly understand the use cases yet.

I think we are better off with a future OSTree + Btrfs. Right now there are few optimizations in OSTree (specifically rpm-ostree) for Btrfs. But I think stateless systems will be easier to backup and restore and also update and rollback. Right now it's messy.

Chris Murphy

My goal, for now, is to disable creation of snapshots. I have built a bootable USB drive and have been able to use it to transfer my system to another machine, the one I am currently working on. I have an Alienware laptop, and the recommendations on the Nouveau-Nvida list were to run version 4 of the kernel. So last night I attempted to upgrade my 3.2 system to Leap, only to receive an internal error message at the very end suggesting I should send the logs to ? But I do not know where the logs are kept, so I will repeat the operation and take a picture of the message flashed on the screen.

If I did not have the bootable USB drive, I would be dead in the water right now. So I think there is some merit in having an image backup.

Don

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