[mythtv-users] Backup software

[Edmund]

On 23/07/12 23:14, Amy Overmyer wrote:
> I had a total hard drive failure on one of my mythtv slave backends. 
> Fortunately, I have a stack of old ~200 G IDE drives that were pulled 
> from my master backend some time back whilst I was upgrading to higher 
> capacity SATA drives. Unfortunately, it's probably only a matter of 
> time until the replacement fails as well as these disks are some years 
> old. Obviously to recover, I had to reinstall mythbuntu, recompile my 
> kernel (stv0900 driver works better with a patch), and setup my mythtv 
> stuff.  The recompiling of the kernel is probably the most painful 
> part as this backend is a Geode 1750Mhz CPU. It is not a fast process 
> on that chip. Since this is a slave, it doesn't keep recordings or 
> videos on it.
>
> Anyway, what I was thinking is since I do have a stack of harddrives, 
> if there is software out there that could backup my existing linux 
> setup on that slave to another harddrive? I don't think any of them 
> are identical in size, so imaging would probably not work.  I've read 
> a little about MondoRescue on this list, but that thread was from 
> 2006! Does anyone do something similar?
I used to do what I think it is you want to do. I used to use a program 
called BootIt. I installed it on a CD and then the computer could boot 
from that CD and copy any partition to a file, or back again. When the 
partition was re-created it had to be the same size as the original 
partition, but the files could be stored on any size disc. When I had a 
failure I copied the most recent copy onto a new (old) disc and then I 
had my system running again very quickly. I had MyDocuments on a 
separate partition which was backed up differently. I didn't have back 
up the root files each day.

I'd expect that dd or something similar on a linux rescue disc will do 
something similar. Also I imagine that your root partition is very small 
so you should be able to make a rescue USB stick which has enough spare 
room to fit the copy of the root partition.

Anyway you can copy a partition from a disc onto a another disc which is 
at least as large as the first partition.

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