Antoine Jacoutot wrote: > On Tue, 6 Nov 2007, Nick Holland wrote: >> what benefit do you see in having /altroot on the same disk as / ? > > See the thread "Regenerating damaged /etc" ;) >
see /var/backup. :) Really. /altroot is useful for certain things, but ONLY certain things. Don't call it a backup, as it isn't rotated. You have less than 24 hours to actually decide "oh, I screwed up!" and get your data back. It generates an unclean file system, and the cleanup of that file system leaves strange looking error messages in your daily report. AND on a single disk, it is blatantly not bootable -- the pbr tries to pull /boot from 'a', where it was installed to. That's why the ROOTBACKUP process uses 'dd', to make sure the file system is IDENTICAL in layout. And / is hardly the only place where important files reside. Here's a script I've used: ==== /etc $ more daily.local #!/bin/sh PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin TGZFILE=/backup/`date "+backup%Y-%m-%d"`.tgz cd / tar czf $TGZFILE etc var ls -l $TGZFILE # Verify it worked. # Restore to second drive. Delete if no second drive. mount /dev/wd1a /mnt # second drive root mount /dev/wd1f /mnt/var # second drive /var cd /mnt tar xzpf $TGZFILE cd / umount /mnt/var umount /mnt ==== if you /backup is "finite", you will need a purge step in there, but in the system I implemented this in looked like it could go ten or more years before filling /backup. :) yes, this restores /etc just before the ROOTBACKUP process overwrites it, but this is just a couple seconds of wasted effort. Nick.
