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Forum Discussion
Dewdman42
Sep 17, 2017Virtuoso
How to backup boot partition or system config?
I have been pulling my hair out trying to figure out the best way to backup my boot partition. well not only the boot partition, but also /data/.apps/. I'm just running into one road block after an...
Marty_M
Sep 21, 2017NETGEAR Employee Retired
Hello Dewdman42,
It does appear that you would like to verify if there is some kind of backup option where you can backup the whole of the NAS so if in case something happen you can just load the backup and the NAS will work and everything will be back in business. Unfortunately the NAS can only perform data backup, I do agree it would be a good Idea to have some kind of backup like that. This can be raised to our ReadyNAS Idea Exchange Board adding a kudos to the post would help, if the post manage to get a lot of kudos Netgear might consider adding the feature in the future.
Regards,
Marty_M
NETGEAR Community Team
Dewdman42
Sep 21, 2017Virtuoso
Ok I will do. Yes the ability to back and restore the machine would definitely help me sleep at night.
What I am doing in the meantime, I am going to run a borg job that backups certain key dirs like /etc, /data/.apps, /home, /root, /usr/local and a few others to a borg archive. I can't do a complete restore with that, but if I have to start over, at least I can restore those, or certain files from those to get my config back...manually.
After having used apt-get to install certain things and tweak my readynas to perfection, I just wish there was a way to image it or back it up in some way so that I can get it all back again.
- SandsharkSep 21, 2017Sensei - Experienced User
I have not tried it, but perhaps you can do it using a CloneZilla boot USB stick? Let us know if you have success.
- Dewdman42Sep 21, 2017Virtuoso
Hey thanks for pointing that out! I will give it a try with a readynas vm first to see what happens.
I have two main concerns or questions about imaging a linux system
- Does the system have to be shutdown in some way in order for the image to be autonomous?
- Anyone know what kind of volume mounting "wierdness" in the readynas that might throw a tool like that off? For example, the fact that /apps is some kind of low level link to /data/.apps, etc...
- Dewdman42Sep 21, 2017Virtuoso
well actually right off the bat I guess that solution may not work since it seems to require booting into a special boot mode to do the backup, similar to Norton Ghost. But I don't know of any way to boot the Readynas from USB or otherwise in such a way to use this tool.
I think this tool would need to be adapted for the Readynas, baked into firmware somehow. I could be wrong though.
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