Hi folks,

About live backup of complete hard drive including OS, data, etc. direct on CD/DVD.

Can I apply tar command plus bunzip creating a compressed tarball, pipe the output direct on mkisofs/growisofs creating ISO image and finally pipe to output to cdrecord/growisofs to burn CD/DVD. If possible please advise how to start.

OR are there other suggestions.

TIA

B.R.
satimis

Take a look at kdar:

http://kdar.sourceforge.net/

I haven't used it myself but it seems to have what you want.

Hi,

Noted with tks.

satimis

If you prefer a shell based approach, what you describe should work. I would tar with 'cjf' to provide bzip2 compression along with a new file, then create the ISO and pass it to cdrecord (most likely with a pipe to avoid too many temporary files).

Hi Matir,

Yes, I prefer shell based solution piping the commands. I have been running compressed tar to backup data for sometimes and burn the compressed tarballs on CD/DVD. It is simple and straightforwards for backup and easy to restore. But I never tested it on backup the whole HD before.

Now I'm considering piping the commands avoiding building too many temporary files. However is there anyway not to use RAM otherwise it needs at least >3G capacity. I have been considering writing a short script running tar compression, burning the tarballs and finaly deleting them after burning. But if I can overcome the RAM problem the solution will be much easier. Backup/Restore can be done without 3rd party software.

Any advice? TIA

B.R.
satimis

I would dump the .tar.bz2 to disk, then mkisofs and pipe that straight to cdrecord. This will need only one temporary file and (relatively) little RAM.

If you don't want to backup files using kdar, and want to backup an image of the partition, I would recommend backing up to an external drive instead of dvd. Your partition is probably larger than 4.4 GB, so an image wouldn't fit without splitting the file. Remember that the T in TAR stands for tape, so restoring multiple volumes from DVD rather than tape may be a chore. The DAR command is written to work with DISCs.

To backup the image to an external drive, you can use the "dd" command, pipe it through "tar" and pipe the output of tar to "split". If the external drive uses one of the FAT file systems, it has a 2 GB limit, so that is why you may need to use split. Another advantage is that the file sizes will be more reasonable, and you can use par2 to produce parity files to recover files if they later become corrupted or deleted by mistake.

I backed up the contents of files on my home directory this way before a fresh install of SuSE 10.1 on my laptop. I was able to cat the backed up files, and pipe that to tar to recover the files, or even listing the contents. All this without ever producing a temporary file.

If it will help, here is a previous post where I gave the actual commands.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...38#post2308238

---

When I tested the above post on my /boot partition, I tried both the -z and -j options. I was expecting the -j option (bzip2) to compress better then the -x option (gzip), however the filesize of the gzip'ed version was smaller.

Hi Matir,

Tks for your advice.

That is what I'm now doing. I'm curious to learn whether there is some other way round even w/o creating .tar.bz2 on disk.

B.R.
satimis

Hi jschiwal,

Tks for your advice.

I'll learn kdar later which is new to me.

an external drive?
Whether HD mounted on an USB enclosure can work for me. I can dump the compress partition image on it. But I haven't figured out how to restore on running rescue disk.

On your posting;
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...38#post2308238

Re:Please explain in more detail. TIA

Others noted with tks.

B.R.
satimis

I'm personally not familiar with par2, but as far as dumping a compressed disk image to another disk, you could do something like this:
And restoration via:

The par2 command produces parity files, so if one or two of the split files are bad, you can run "par2repair" and get them back. If producing the parity files, one of the arguments is either the number of parity files to produce or the percentage of redundancy.

I think that if you have the package it will be called par2cmdline.

If you don't have the package, here is the sourceforge project:
http://parchive.sourceforge.net/

If your distro is RPM based, then a search on http://rpm.pbone.net for par2cmdline may find a version for your distro. Since it is a commandline tool, you should be able to use a package for a different distro, provided you don't have any library version conflict issues.

Hi Matir,

Tks for your advice.

What I'm most concerned is whether running rescue CD can detect the USB enclosure. I'll buy an USB enclosure to make this test next time when I visit the computer shop. Its price is quite cheap. I have 6G, 9G, 10G, ATA/33/66, etc. old HDs here.

Tks.

B.R.
satimis

Hi jschiwal,

Tks for your explanation and URLs.

"yum seach par2cmdline" found this package and I have "par2cmdline.x86_64" installed on my PC. There is no "man par2"

Just visted their site;
http://parchive.sourceforge.net/

If not running RAID, would this package help? TIA

B.R.
satimis

I don't know about specific rescue cds, but most of them should have no trouble seeing your USB drive.

Hi jschiwal,

I just tested both;

$ tar jcpf Documents_2060725.tar.bz2 Documents_2060725
$ tar zcpf Documents_20060725.tar.gz Documents_20060725

File size;
$ du -m Documents_20060725.tar.bz2$ du -m Documents_20060725.tar.gzNot much difference. But to my surprize the compressing time for "Gzipped Tar Archive" was much faster.

B.R.
satimis