On 15/05/15 12:18, Carl Turney wrote:
Hi All,
BACKGROUND:
Am a single-system home-office user of Linux. Not a professional
sysadmin. Running Linux Mint 17 Qiana, desktop, 64-bit Intel.
My "total system backup" scheme has been (for the last ~10 years) to run
rsync (in a script, from / recursively), onto
similarly-formatted/installed disks. Has worked perfectly over the
years, on Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mint... as backups are essentially clones,
and become new master disks in the event of crashes.
I'm definitely not a pro sysadmin either, but I tend to live dangerously.
I think the crucial word here is "essentially". I presume your system
is using the venerable
MBR booting method which contains a direct reference to a spot on the
disk where there is
bootstrap code, and this ref. is set when grub2-install is run either
implicitly or explicitly.
When you copy the grub first-stage bootstrap binary to another disk it
will not be in the same
position on the disk - I think it is a disk not a partition reference
that is used, so if you wish to
change which is to to be the bootstrap that will run _its_ grub.cfg then
you need to run
grub2-install to configure what you want.
Having a bootable USB stick with all your favourite things makes this
easier. I find that the
SanDisk Extreme 16G or larger gives the best performance here.
I have lots of OS partitions spread around multiple disks and machines
mostly on SSD, each
exactly the same 15G size, and I back them up using dd to an external HD
via eSATA-III to
make an exact partition clone to a file. It only takes a few minutes
each. The fun bit is when
you put two clones on the one system - you need to change one of the
UUIDs (tune2fs -U <>)
and edit the UUID in the grub.cfg of the booting one to match.
Btw - this implies that you clone the MBR to a file as well - every time
that you make a change
to the partition table or run grub2-install.
You may find documentation at /usr/share/doc/grub2-tools/grub.html
Be aware that it can be dated - it describes grub2-install as just a
script, but I had a look and
on my FC21 it is a full blown binary.
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