Hi

Using Slackware 8.1

It seems that my root partition has some how been corrupted.

I've managed to get it back ok but there were still a "few inodes that couldn't be fix" (I think that was the problem).

Anyway it works OK at the moment

How would I go about backing up some of the data there?

For example, as well as personal files and mail etc ... what about the actual structure of programs I've installed from source ... like Apache, PHP, MySQL etc ...

All of these are loacted in /usr/local/

Can I just cp the files to another partition?
Will it retain their correct structure so that if I have to format/reinstall I can just copy them back accross?

Should I use the ditto command?

Can you somehow preserve the file permissions?

Is it possible to back these files up to a VFAT partition??

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

OSX

Check out the tar command. You can tar and zip the files to some other directory and it will hold the structure and permissions. Tar should do what you want just fine.


There is also some really cool software out there that will do an entire backup of your system on multiple cd's. Check this out:

http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/

I plan to use this one once I get all my servers in place.

http://www.bacula.org/

But that might be overkill.

Road

Thanks for the reply

I decided to use tar and gzip - keep it simple

Anway, I've got a backup of all the important files so hopefully that should be ok

Since Slack 9.0 is out now I think I'll format my existing ext2 partitions and install that. Just got to decide on a FS to use now

I hear XFS is fast and reliable so I think I'll give that a shot

Cheers

Do you have any idea what caused the corruption? Moving to a journaled filesystem is a great idea if you have unreliable power and you want to minimize the possiblilty of losing data (plus avoiding those long fscks). It's not going to help much if the corruption was caused by a program that went berserk and scribbled on the disk.

The logging in syslog wasn't too in depth

Had a check and basically it seems I ran out of memory!
512MB RAM, 512MB Swap

Was running dropline Gnome at the time so I'm a bit suspect of some app in there

Don't know what program caused it but still I had to manually shutdown which "I think" corrupted the hard disk.

Anyway ... I reinstalled Slack after formatting - still using ext2fs, but i haven't installed dropling gnome so we'll see how it goes

I was going to use XFS but couldn't work out what it's "partition type number" (don't know the term - but Linux Swap is 82 I think and Linux ext2 is 83)... anyway never mind.

Thanks for the help

OSX

XFS Faq ... but as a general rule all Linux
native filesystems (ext2, ext3, Reiserf, and even xfs)
use type 83 (Linux native).

But I wouldn't use it at the moment, not because
it's a bad FS (actually I think it's awesome!), but
because it's only available as a patch against
2.4.19 kernels and I had quite a few troubles
with that kernel :} and don't have the time to
try to integrate it into 2.4.20 myself.

Cheers,
Tink