[sllug-members]: Re: Backup/restore/mirror question

[Knight Walker]

On Tue, 2008-04-29 at 10:09 -0700, Steve Hildebrand wrote:
> I am going to be getting a WD 2.5" portable HD for data storage, and
> in the near future I will be upgrading the old AMD7 Linux box to
> something that isn't carved from stone.  If I make a full backup of
> root, run a basic install of Kubuntu on the new system to get it up
> and running, would I be able to lay the old system down on top of
> that?  I would expect a video tweak, maybe some hardware shuffling.
> Of course, the new board will have SATA drives, am I right in not
> expecting that to be a problem?

Depending on your version of Kubuntu (Old and new), there are
directories you will want to specifically exclude from your
backup: /dev, /proc, and /sys come to mind immediately.  You'll also
want to be careful with /etc, especially /etc/fstab, since your new SATA
drive(s) will have different device names than your old hd* drive(s)
(But this shouldn't be a problem if you're using LVM).

> I would rather not mess with a network level solution, if at all
> possible, but I can do that if that is the best or only low-hassle
> solution.

I've always done system upgrades in a rather low-level way. I
backup /etc, /var, /home, and maybe a few other directories, then
install the new system and selectively restore/patch files into /etc
and /var.  /home is pretty much drag-n-drop, though sometimes
differences in the .gnome* and .gconf* directories can cause merry hell.
Also, if you can get a list of currently-installed packages from the old
system and back that up too, you can run a big apt-get install ... to
get all those back, and with the backup of /etc, you should have
system-level configs for anything not installed from source.

-KW