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Forum Discussion
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...
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.
I have not tried it, but perhaps you can do it using a CloneZilla boot USB stick? Let us know if you have success.
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...
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.
I know of no way to image a mounted Linux file system, which is the reason you would need a USB boot stick. The ReadyNAS can boot from USB, though. Sme who have converted to FreeNAS use that option. I'm not sure how Clonezilla handles links. Using the "bare metal" option I think should preserve the link, but you would have to separately back up the link's target.
I would assume that those people who are able to boot via USB have specially prepared USB boot disk that takes into account peculiarities of the readynas hardware. I will try to prepare a clonezilla usb boot disk and try it one of these days to see what happens, but that is what I would expect. Maybe not though, maybe it could boot just fine and just see the bare bone disk partitions for exactly whatever they are and image them as is...then in theory restore them in place also, but honestly I'd be afraid to try this without a nod from someone at Netgear.
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