On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 04:31:45PM +0100, solitone wrote: > > > On 19 Nov 2018, at 12:35, Jonathan Dowland <j...@debian.org> wrote: > > > > On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 07:01:07AM +0100, solitone wrote: > >> When I was playing with my disk's partition table I messed it up and > >> lost everything. It was a dual boot system with macOS and Debian. > >> > >> Thanks to the back2l utility I have a full backup of Debian. Now I > >> would reinstall it and recover all the backed up files. However, I > >> didn’t use LVM and now I would. In this case, would the adjustments > >> needed from the original configuration be difficult? > > > > This rather depends on how back2l functions. I can't find a reference to > > it in the Debian package repositories. Can you point us at a URI that > > describes it? > > It simply results in a backup of the filesystem archived in a tarball. > Once I reinstall Debian, I can restore the original configuration > pulling in the original version of my files from that tarball. But > this would work if the configuration were the same. If I install with > LVM something would be different in terms of configuration, so some > original config files wouldn’t be right, and I’d need some manual > adjustement. The point is: how much?
LVM requires certain kernel modules and hooks to be present in initramfs. If your current installation lacks them, I suggest you to install lvm2 before the backup to save yourself the hassle of regenerating initramfs after the restore. You'll definitely need to adjust /etc/fstab, most likely /etc/default/grub, and to update the bootloader. Also, since it's you're using backup2l with tar backend, you'll need to do something to restore all those capabilities extended attributes. A hint here is: grep setcap /var/lib/dpkg/info/* Reco
