----- Original Message -----
From: "Randall"
On Monday 18 August 2008 09:00:27 pm Henare Degan wrote:
I don't mean to rub salt into the wound but shouldn't the backup be a recent copy of your system, and therefore not need an OS reinstall or major patching? ;)
The problem is that I did have backup, except for the /sys folder and some other key files. Sure, I overwrote the root partition with the backup information, but upon attempting a reboot the dmesg syslogs started piling up and finally boot came to a halt. It was very unnerving to watch this and realize that doing a cp -ruvp or cp -a command won't cut the mustard as far as having a system with enough integrity to come back to life.
Good god of course they don't. Whatever teacher or book told you cp was a sufficient means to backup a system should be removed from circulation. You think the hundreds of free and commercial backup and crash recovery apps because , what, no one knows about the amazing simple free "cp" already there on every box? (Backup & crash recovery are two completely different tasks btw, only barely related, often combined in one product merely for convenience) Of course the /sys directory wasn't backed up. (btw, "folders" are pretty little icons used to represent _directories_ in a gui) /sys is dynamically generated, or rather, it's not really ever there at all except the top level empty directory as a mount point. It's a virtual interface to kernel features and can no more be backed up than /proc Having pointed out how utterly wrong it was to think "cp" was a backup system, I should compliment or balance that by providing a suggestion of some backup util that IS good. But there are so many and they all have their pros & cons and most of them I've never even used (beacause, there are so many...) that I almost can't. Except to say to google "linux backup" & try things that seem to claim to do what you want or work the way that you'd like. What I do for myself is probably no help, since rather than do traditional backups, instead I have systems that are standardized such that it's actually simpler and easier to just do fresh installs, and all data & config is handled by rsync scripts. Whe I used to need to do traditional bakups, and still today for any customers with their own servers, I have used BackupEdge a lot and can definitely highly recommend it. But, it's far from free and I don't know if any of the free apps might not be as good so I wouldn't want you to miss out on trying them and maybe finding a good solution. good luck. Brian K. White brian@aljex.com http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR +++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++. filePro BBx Linux SCO FreeBSD #callahans Satriani Filk! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org