Re: A backupp to install Fedora Core 5 again

[Charles Curley]

First off, please turn off the HTML in the email. In Compose, hit
"plain text". Thank you.

On Sat, Sep 09, 2006 at 01:00:39PM +0300, Heikki Pesonen wrote:
>  
>     I have 3 times installed Fedora Core  (3, 4 and 5) to my computer.  Never
>     has it gone in the way I hoped. Probably I have difficulties with the fine
>     LVM-system. I have read a lot of it and now I suppose I understand it. Last
>     time Fedora Core took all of my Linux-hard disk (160 Gb). Now I wanted to
>     start the fourth attempt, to give Fedora only let's say 40 Gb. Because I am
>     relatively satisfied to my recent installation, I wanted to make a complete
>     backup of my recent installation to DVD's and then  after reinstalling
>     Fedora restore it.
>     I know the command tar and there is also in Fedora installation File Roller
>     2.14.0, an archieve manager.  I looked at Bill McCartys book "Learning Red
>     Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora" (2005), but did not find advice about
>     reasonable backup strategy in my case. Could someone kindly tell me what
>     folders  I should include in the tar-file and how to restore them in a
>     relatively simple way. 
Make a list of currently installed packages:

rpm -qa | sort > ~/packages.txt

If you use any of the SQL Databases, create a suitable backup for it.

Back up /home, /etc and /var.

Reinstall. Set up your users again. /etc/passwd will help you with
this. Add packages listed in packages.txt that you didn't install
during the installation.

Restore /home. You may have to change the ownership on some of the
users, depending on how you set them up this time vs. last. "man
chown"

Restore /etc and /var selectively. I usually unpack them to a separate
location and copy files in as needed, or edit the working file vs the
backed up one. If you use emacs, look at ediff mode. It takes a while,
but there is no simple way to do it.

Write down what you do as you do it so that next time you have a
checklist; it will go faster.

-- 

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