On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 5:30 PM, Mark Knecht <markkne...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 3:18 PM, Paul Hartman >> <paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 4:49 PM, Nikos Chantziaras <rea...@arcor.de> wrote: >>>> On 28/02/12 00:41, Mark Knecht wrote: >>>>> >>>>> Are there any tools that will: >>>>> >>>>> 1) Ensure that for every installed packages there is a corresponding >>>>> tbz2 file in /usr/portage/packages? >>>>> >>>>> 2) Remove any older versions in /usr/portage/packages prior to me >>>>> running a backup? >>>> >>>> >>>> I think app-portage/gentoolkit can help with its "eclean" tool >>>> (specifically, "eclean-pkg"). >>>> >>>> "man eclean" should get you started. >>> >>> And as an example of savings... I run eclean once in a while, but not >>> automated. I just ran it and got these results: >>> >>> [ 14.8 G ] Total space from 1673 files were freed in the distfiles >>> directory >>> >>> I guess I should use it more frequently. ;) >>> >> >> 15GB is a nice clean up! >> >> I don't think I'd want to run it automatically, at least not often. If >> it automatically deleted things that work in favor of newly built but >> untested packages that would defeat the purpose in my mind. >> >> As basically nothing but a home user I'm trying after 12 years to >> piece together some sort of a backup strategy here, including how to >> do a restore if a drive died, etc. I'll ask some questions about that >> later, but likely it should be it's own thread. >> >> Cheers, >> Mark > > You can probably just exclude /usr/portage from your backup entirely, > since it'll be restored with an emerge --sync (or webrsync) and any > distfiles can be downloaded again if they are needed. >
Agreed. My server has about 400GB to back up. Roughly 360GB is virtual machines which get backed up daily already so I have that handled. Of the other 40GB it seems that (excluding portage, /var and a few other things) I need to back up about 24GB which I think can be backed up live. I'm not really worried about restoring the exact state of the machine in one pass. This isn't a business, etc. I just want to get back fairly quickly to where I was before the presumed failure. I figure if I get: /home /boot /usr/src /etc /var/lib/portage and maybe one or two more, then a restore would hopefully be something like doing a quick install as per the Gentoo docs and then laying this stuff on top and doing an emerge -ke @world. Or at least that's what I'm trying to puzzle together. I'm planning on trying it with an additional hard drive as a test. I'll have to modify fstab as the main system is a 5 drive RAID6 monster and for testing I just want a single drive to verify that it works. QUESTION: As for ensuring that every package actually has a corresponding tbz2 file in the packages directory, would emerge -ek @world install everything from packages except in the case of something not existing in which case it would build and store it? Thanks, Mark
