Howto: Easy Full System Backup and Restore

Hi Annafil, I've just downloaded the program and my screens are so different from yours. Maybe I've an other version? Fwbackups 1.43.1

 

Yep, i have the same version. Pretty much the same options that can be enabled. A few are renamed but no big changes.

I wanted to restore my system yesterday and i was a little bit confused about how long it takes to restore.
I saved my backup to my external HDD, so i could see that the actual copying of the files took about 2 or 3 minutes. But the process to end took like 20+ minutes. And it didnt even end after 20 minutes. So i cancelled the operation and restarted my system and the restoring obviously worked...
I selected "File System" for the restoring destination, because the programm says, that if that option is choosen, all files are restored to there original location. That sounded good to me.
Pls annafil, help me

 

Oo looks like there is a new version indeed. I'll look through see if there are any noticeable changes but from what i can tell right now, you should still be able to match the options frommy screenshots to the ones in the current app, leave whatever is different untouched and you should be safe..

suki22: what is the file system you are saving your backup to? if you are saving to fat32 formatted file system then that could be your problem - i had a backup hang on me because it was saving to a fat32 thumbdrive...you can't use the rsync option - fat32 doesnt respect file permissions and such, you have to use one of the .tar options (I suggest no compression).

or you could format a partition on your external as ext2 using gparted (available from yum).

if it's not fat32, find me on IM we'll figure it out and hopefully update the thread

 

Ok, i installed gparted and heres what a found out:

My external HDD is ext2 formated, but it has a little exclamation mark next to the partitionname. Dont know whats up with that.
I used the rsync method for backupping, exact as you wrote in your tuto

By the way, i saw that my SD Card which is used for storage expansion, is fat32... I inserted it out of the box, and i thought that linpus would do some kind of preparation in a wizzard or something like that. But that didnt happen, so i thought everything is ok.
Should i format the SD card with ext2 or is this no problem as long as the system files are on the internal SSD and i keep my backups on other devices or partitions?

Edit:
IM is a good idea, what do you got? MSN? ICQ? My addys/numbers are in my profile.

Edit2:
Ok, if i import the set, and click on "restore set", the programm sets the destination to "root", and if i execute it, my disk space becomes smaller. I guess, it is just copying the files to a folder somewhere in "/" instead of overwriting the backupped files?!?!

 

suki: if there's a ! next to a partition in gparted, there's a good chance it wasn't unmounted properly or there is some kind of error. That could be causing the problem with the backup, your SD card doesn't factor into it because my backup method only touches internal hard disk files.

Try right clicking on your external partition, and selecting "check" in gparted. This will trigger a disk check which should hopefully put everything back in its place..

 

yes you;re right, it's just adding files into that folder.. you need to specify "/" instead of "/root". Just /

 

Ok, ill check my external drive with gparted today. But im afraid ill have to do a recovery installation to fix some other things and to get a clean system again.

Ok. Im not sure but i think that one is not to say "/" is the destination, because theres a comboBox with a few suggestions where to save the backup to. Like File System (which i think is / ), root, some folders and some more i think. (im no on my one at the moment).
I thought, the programm would know the destination through the set which has been created, and would change it to the correct one...

Yes, i know that your tuto only touches the internal SSD, but my question was, if it could cause any problems while working with my AAO.
e.g. saving files to it (permissions), ejecting and remounting it to copy files to my desktop pc or whatever...

 

Yeah ideally such a program should know the destination, but what are ya gonna do.. I guess I need to updaate the howto to make this a bit clearer.

And no, the SD card shouldn't cause any problems

 

Yep, a newer version of the tutorial with the new programm version would be good, to make things clear.

Im sorry to say, but i could find the time to check my HDD, hope tomorrow theres some spare time to do this.
But, if the hdd isnt the problem, i still dont know which destination im supposed to choose or why the recovery takes 20+ minutes...
Anyway, maybe you could check those suggestions for the backup location, and tell us what is the right one

 

Ok well the time taken to backup will vary every single time you make the backup. I know when I do a complete restore it takes almost 1.5 hours because it's writing to SSD, so maybe reading from SSD is taking very long as well and I could have been wrong about my first backup.

What happens is the backups are incremental - only hte changes are backed up. So the first time around it could take.. a while... If your hard disk is OK - be patient! Leave it overnight if you have to.

Check the log for errors if it's still hanging in the morning

 

I had to restore my AAO and I've selected destination ROOT and now my disk space is 1.3Gb less. I think nothing is being restored. It seems that I made a copy from the files on the hard disk from the AAO. What can I do to get the 1.3Gb disk space back?

 

That's one of the problems with using fwbackups to try and backup your whole drive. When it comes to restore time, should you need to do it from scratch, you need to install the original first, installs fwbackups and THEN go about restoring. If you make a mistake as to where to restore to, you end up with what you got. :-(

When you say you restored to ROOT, what do you mean? Did you restore to /root or / ?

Cheers.

 

When you go to “Restore” you can choose from a few destinations “Root”, “Desktop”,” File System” and “Others”. I restored it to “Root”. The window from fwbackups has a tip:”File System” will restore files to their original location. I think I had to restore to “File System”

 

Hi Annafil,

Thanks for your seemingly clear instruction to get backups done. I installed fwbackups as you described, but the desktop icon is inactive. I can only start fwbackups from the terminal. Further, when in do backups, I get a million errors in the log and only a few files get backed-up. What's going on? I have this machine for a week now and I already had to do a complete recovery.

I'm new to the aspireone and Í'm truely amazed how crappy, rickety, immature systems these unux/linix/linpus systems are. I wish I had listened to this little voice and had bought an XP version. even for the simplest things as copying a file I almost need a soldering iron.

Thanks for your help,

Michel

 

Michel, first of all, don't compare Linpus to other Linux systems - it's apples and oranges. Linpus is stripped down to give you fast boot times and a lot of other improvements at the expense of some customizeability. other linux versions don't have a lot of the problems Linpus faces.

If you're getting erros during backup, you're not running the backup utility with the right permissions. Go through it again and make sure you pay attention to the "sudo" commands.

Rbil: yep you're right, you need to get the program back on Linpus before you can recover. Howver that's only ONE thing that you need to do to get stuff back to the way it way, as opposed to re-applying all the tweaks, patches and updates again If you're more familiar with command line, you can use a live cd like I do and just use the "cp" command...

Rob's tip is probably right on the money (I can't verify, I always restore using a live cd because that's easier for me), but if you backup the same directories as in the Howto, choosing / will put everything back where it's supposed to be.

 

hello annafil!

and how do you make a live "restore" cd???

 

Hi, I ran into a couple of snags that I didn't see addressed here yet. I wanted to back up to my NTFS Data drive on a PC running XP using fwbackups and PyNeighborhhood through WIFI.
RSYNC didn't seem to like NTFS. It would just stop. Selecting .tar with the NTFS drive as the destination just wouldn't start.
I wound up backing up to my Downloads directory on the same AspireOne as a .tar file, then copied the file to the PC. Had to start the file manager with sudo thunar though to get permission to the backup file.
I don't how I will eventually use my backup yet, but at least I now have a chance to recover from a crash.

 

Well, so far fwbackups never worked for me - every time i'm starting a backup my AAO display just went black, the cursor shows up and nothing happens. After a reboot, same thing, the cursor shows up instead of gdm and i have to do a complete reinstall, theres nothing but a black screen. Does any one have the same problems? It's quite strange, neither my SSD nor my external USB drive are showing any action while the restore-process.
I formatted my drive to ext2.
:?

 

I've used PING at http://ping.windowsdream.com/ to image Win XP computers for a couple years and it's saved my bacon several times. It's just a small live linux .iso that uses PartImage to image selected partitions of your HDD or SSD. Use UNetbootin at http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ to make a bootable USB flash drive from the PING .iso file. Using an 8GB flash drive, PING imaged 2.5GB of system files on the linpus SSD partition into 1GB of image files on the USB flash using Gzip compression in about 11 minutes. I will be able to keep several images from different dates on this one flash drive.

Do read the PING PDF instructions carefully, generally it uses the space bar to make selections and enter to advance to the next step. The image name you enter creates a folder of that name with several files in it. For a restoration, you don't need to select a target because the image file names indicate where they go. It also copies your BIOS settings (not the BIOS itself) and offers the option to restore those too.

My AA1 is new so I haven't needed to make a restoration on it yet. This is better than the rescue CD since you just go back to you most recent image, not the base configuration.

 

hi jinx022 (& all others too)

newish to the aao and have follow lots of "how to" and got the little critter working reasonably well BUT the next changes are bigger than i would like to do without doing back-up first.
following these pages there seems to be a method using FWbackups, but this requires changing my image first with another download. several threads suggest that a small bootable live version from a USB stick are possible, to date i have not managed it :roll:

i downloaded the .iso as per jinx022 & used the UNetbootin as per the instructions, all i get is "boot error" and the aao waits for me to remove the USB.

i have managed to get damn_small_linux iso (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/) working from a cd but not from a usb.
the slax608-rc6.iso (http://www.slax.org/) won't even boot from a cd & definately not from a usb.
the usb key is W95 FAT32
(& i haven't tried booting to any windows machine just to the aao)

has anyone here successfully got a USB boot work? am i doing something so wrong? is it just a simple error that i have made?
help please

tia