Re: Making a backup...

[Zdenko Barbaric <zbarbari@ix.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>]

Hi Martin-Eric,

MER> However, how do I make an integral backup of my Unix filesystem
MER> (Minix fs), without having to re-establish all file permissions 
MER> or symlinks, when reinstalling?
There's a quite easy solution to your problem, if your harddsik is big
enough ... ;-)
I did it this way:
I've got two identical minix partitions on my hd (f,g). KGMD is installed
on bothof them; g: is for actual use whereas f: is the backup.
I added the following lines to my mint.cnf :

ren g: u:\sys
ren f: u:\shdw

sln u:\sys\usr   u:\usr
sln u:\sys\bin   u:\bin 
sln u:\sys\etc   u:\etc 

... etc.

The next thing is to use 'cron' (you can also do that manually ;-) ,
but with 'cron' it works nearly automagically :-) ) to update your
'shdw' partition from your 'sys' partition from time to time executing
the following:
cd /sys/; cp -au * /shdw/

This way, only the changed files on 'sys' are actualized on 'shdw',
perserving symbolic links and file permissions.
Now if your filesystem on 'sys' crashes and you need complete
reinstallation, the only thing to do is to change 

ren g: sys
ren f: shdw

to

ren f: sys
ren g: shdw

in your mint.cnf and reboot.


The last thing to do, is to reinstall the minixfs on g: using minit and
copy back your unix files from f: to it. There may be more elegant ways to
handle the problem mentioned in your mail, but this one works fine for me
a long time now ... ;-)


Greetings,
                             Zdenko





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