Stoopid but pressing backup question

[craigni]

Thank you all again for helping me figure out a workable backup/restore solution for Fedora 8.  (In fact, I'm writing this from the restored drive.)  My guess is that when most get to this point, the steps to backup and restore seem so obvious that they don't write about them, but as getting to this point required a couple hours of experimentation and research, I'm posting this for those who want literal nuts and bolts backup/restore instructions.

I am absolutely certain that there is a better way to do this, but this works.  It took about an hour and a quarter to go from unformatted drive to fully restored OS on two very different systems with very different backup and OS drives.  I am 100% certain that the 30 minutes spent getting a bare bones OS on to the drive can be cut greatly--but even with just base system and hardware checked on the Anaconda bare bones install, it still insisted on installing X and Gnome.  I am also fairly certain that the 15 minutes or so at the end having the system do an SELinux targeted policy relabel should  have a workaround, as I am also fairly certain that the yum kernel update should have a workaround.  But as I said, this works, and gets the system back up in about an hour and a quarter, and you can use a totally different hard drive for your OS than the one you backed up.

My backup strategy was to use rsnapshot (http://www.rsnapshot.org/ [1])  I excluded /proc, /mnt and the mount point for my backup, /backup, but backed up everything else.

This *did not work* for backing up to an ntfs-3g drive.  The rsync rsnapshot calls choked on certain files when backing up.  This works on an ext3 formatted drive (the default linux format at this point.)

Obviously, if someone is using this, the backup drive /dev mount point will need to point to their specific device, and the directory names for their backup will need to point to their rsnapshot backup.

0. Unplug everything except the new hard drive
1. Insert the Fedora DVD, and install a barebone OS on the new hard drive
2. Push the DVD tray back into its bay
3. During the reboot cycle, do not allow the system to reboot.  Turn off the computer, and plug in the backup drive
4. Turn on the computer (with the install disk in the DVD tray) into rescue mode, with network interface
5. chroot /mnt/sysimage
6. update Kernel by "yum update kernel"
7. mkdir /backup
8. mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /backup
9. rsync -av /backup/snapshots/hourly.0/localhost/ /
10. reboot with SELinux disabled with the following instructions:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/fedora-35/login-error-cans-start-session-due-to-internal-error-472622/ [2]
        Turn off SELinux at boot time
    10.1 When the grub splash screen is displayed press any key
    10.2 Select the Linux boot choice and press the 'e' key
    10.3 Select the kernel line and press the 'e' key again
    10.4 At the end of the line add a space followed by selinux=0
    10.5 When done press the 'Enter' key followed by the 'b' key
11. After booting into the system with SELinux disabled, check /etc/selinux/config and check if the options shows the same as below:
    SELinux=enforcing
    selinuxtype=targeted....
12. Reboot
Note: it will take a while because "SELinux targeted policy relabel is required. It will take some time depending on the system"...

Again, thanks for all your help!


Links:
------
[1] http://www.rsnapshot.org/
[2] http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/fedora-35/login-error-cans-start-session-due-to-internal-error-472622/


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