Parted Magic clone and back-up

[verndog]

Ok, it did work after selecting a directory. There's a couple of problems though, one of which is fsrachiver, maybe both.

(1) no update status on what its doing
(2) the LXTerminal displayed is always blank, and when it finally gives any messages it just flashes them and closes.

Just a passing thought, but this interface would be great for partclone. Its terminal interfaces does give information and a lot of it. ETA, speed, success/failure. You would need to determine or decide in the beginning what file system you want backed up, Ext3/3, ntfs, etc.

A side benefit of using partclone is most of Clonezilla backups are using partclone and you can, and I have, use its image.gz.aa on partclone.

[Patrick Verner]

I think I have your concerns fixed.

It defaults to the root of the selected target device, the .fsa name has a time stamp, and the lxterminal output is improved. I added the "-v" option to fsarchiver, so it's as verbose as possible.

I spent some time testing it and it seems to work okay for me.

[Patrick Verner]

Ok, it did work after selecting a directory. There's a couple of problems though, one of which is fsrachiver, maybe both.

(1) no update status on what its doing
(2) the LXTerminal displayed is always blank, and when it finally gives any messages it just flashes them and closes.

Just a passing thought, but this interface would be great for partclone. Its terminal interfaces does give information and a lot of it. ETA, speed, success/failure. You would need to determine or decide in the beginning what file system you want backed up, Ext3/3, ntfs, etc.

A side benefit of using partclone is most of Clonezilla backups are using partclone and you can, and I have, use its image.gz.aa on partclone.

I think fsachiver will be very nice in the future. I was the livecd maintainer of GParted when it was worse then QTParted. Maybe Bart and I should have given up on GParted because QTParted was better? I have confidence that fsarchiver will be better for backing up, while partclone will be better for cloning.

[verndog]

I think fsachiver will be very nice in the future. I was the livecd maintainer of GParted when it was worse then QTParted. Maybe Bart and I should have given up on GParted because QTParted was better? I have confidence that fsarchiver will be better for backing up, while partclone will be better for cloning.

Good point! My only concern regarding fsarchiver is I have had several occasions of errors. Not a lot. Most was 3 files. Weird things I compared the files and they were the same. It must be something about the CRC check.

There's a lot to like about fsarchiver. The list feature for one, among many more. Great speed on restore!

[shantanu_gadgil]

Hi,
I already like this project. My suggestions ... I know this is far too soon for this ... but I wanted to to put it out there ...

* Be able to drive this through a PXE boot
Pass parameters to the initramfs specifying the NFS server, NFS directory, partition/drive to backup/restore, filename to backup/restore (on NFS server), etc and then the backup/restore can happen in a complete hands-off manner.

* Useful functionality: (for headless machines in a lab)
Start a VNC server and run this "automatic" backup/restore in a GUI so that a remote user can connect to this VNC and see what is going on.

Cheers and Regards,
Shantanu

[Ed_P]

FWIW

There are two types of backups imo, one backs up partitions, one backs up hard drives. If you are going to be backing up partitions it would be very useful to backup the drive's MBR also, either automatically or as an option.

With a backup of the MBR a restore of a partition to a new drive is much more straight forward; connect new drive, restore MBR, restore partition.

I currently use DriveImage XML for my backups and have found that restoring a backed up partition to a new drive without a backed up MBR requires more time and utilities to prepare the drive before being able to restore the partition then one would have expected. My backup script now includes a backup of the MBR.

hth