[mythtv-users] Logical backup of MythTV machine

stan stanlist at cox.net
Sat Apr 18 21:50:05 UTC 2009


I asked this before and got a lot of replies about RAID.  Thanks for the
RAID info.  It will be useful.

But, I still don't feel we have a reliable way to make logical backups.

I'd like to make a system backup of my MythTV machine that's running under
Fedora 10 with LVM.  I'd like to be able to restore onto the same physical
machine with Fedora 10 and possibly LVM.  The new disk allocation sizes,
though, might be different.  For instance, a physical drive might stop
working.  The replacement drive will probably be bigger, faster, and
cheaper.

I did a backup with

su
cd /
tar --create --file=/backup/root.tar.bz2 --one-file-system
--checkpoint=10000 --totals --preserve-permissions --xattrs --atime-preserve
--bzip2 --exclude=backup --exclude=proc --exclude=lost+found --exclude=mnt
--exclude=sys --exclude=boot .

for the restore I installed a minimal Fedora 10 system with LVM, and I did a
restore (over the new minimal system) with

su
cd /
tar --extract --file=/backup/root.tar.bz2 --checkpoint=10000 --totals
--preserve-permissions --xattrs --bzip2 --exclude=etc/fstab
--exclude=etc/lvm --exclude=dev/VolGroup00 --exclude=dev/mapper  .

I tried not to overwrite any of the new LVM allocation tables, and I'm
concerned that I might not be excluding enough in the restore.  I only
bumbled around looking for stuff that seemed to have to do with LVM.

Are there any other things I should be excluding in the restore?  Maybe
/dev/.udev?

This seems like a common operation.  Backup the system, and then restore
onto a drive with new allocations.  Seems there should be a howTo saying
things will definitely work if you exclude such and so.

--stan





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