Backing up a file system (Shallow Thoughts)

Backing up a file system

I upgraded my system to the latest Ubuntu, "Gutsy Gibbon", recently. Of course, it's always best to make a backup before doing a major upgrade. In this case, the goal was to back up my root partition to another partition on the same disk and get it working as a bootable Ubuntu, which I could then upgrade, saving the old partition as a working backup. I'll describe here a couple of silly snags I hit, to save you from making the same mistakes.

Linux offers lots of ways to copy filesystems. I've used tar in the past, with a command like (starting in /gutsy): tar --one-file-system -cf - / | tar xvf - > /tmp/backup.out but cp seemed like an easier way, so I want to try it.

I mounted my freshly made backup partition as /gutsy and started a cp -ax /* /gutsy (-a does the right thing for permissions, owner and group, and file type; -x tells it to stay on the original filesystem). Count to ten, then check what's getting copied. Whoops! It clearly wasn't staying on the original filesystem.

It turned out my mistake was that /*. Pretty obvious in hindsight what cp was doing: for each entry in / it did a cp -ax, staying on the filesystem for that entry, not on the filesystem for /. So /home, /boot, /proc, etc. all got copied. The solution was to remove the *: cp -ax / /gutsy.

But it wasn't quite that simple. It looked like it was working -- a long wait, then cp finished and I had what looked like a nice filesystem backup. I adjusted /gutsy/etc/fstab so that it would point to the right root, set up a grub entry, and rebooted. Disaster! The boot hung right after Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0 with no indication of what was wrong.

Rebooting into the old partition told me that what's supposed to happen next is: * Setting preliminary keymap... But the crucial error message was actually several lines earlier: Warning: unable to open an initial console. It hadn't been able to open /dev/console.

Now, in the newly copied filesystem, there was no /dev/console: in fact, /dev was empty. Nothing had been copied because /dev is a virtual file system, created by udev.

But it turns out that the boot process needs some static devices in /dev, before udev has created anything. Of course, once udev's virtual filesystem has been mounted on /dev, you can no longer read whatever was in /dev on the root partition in order to copy it somewhere else. But udev nicely gives you access to it, in /dev/.static/dev. So what I needed to do to get my new partition booting was: cp -ax /dev/.static/dev/ /gutsy/dev/ With that done, I was able to boot into my new filesystem and upgrade to Gutsy.

Tags: linux, ubuntu, backups
[ 23:48 Nov 30, 2007    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]