[Novalug] best way to back up a home partition.

gregory pryzby greg@pryzby.org
Thu Sep 20 11:28:30 EDT 2007


On Thu, Sep 20, 2007 at 11:23:35AM -0400, Bonnie Dalzell wrote:
> 
> i have two harddrives - each with an Ubuntu installation on them. they go 
> into externally accessable drive drawers. one sits on the shelf as a 
> backup.
> 
> last night while trying to get alien to work (the rpm to deb program - 
> not a game) I managed to ugrade ubuntu on the ubuntu drive in the machine. 
> this resulted in loosing the ability to start up x - when you try startx 
> you get the error:
> 
> xinit connection refused (error111)
> 
> so before doing anything else I put the backup harddrive in an booted from 
> it and I used gnome-commander to copy the home directory from the messuped 
> installation harddrive to a subdirectory on another harddrive.
> 
> then it occured to me: what is the best way to do such a backup copy?

Not sure what you want to do.

I would rsync the directory to the backup and use rsync to 'restore'
 
> also of course any suggestions on getting x working again would be 
> apprectiated.

so, I would guess there is a version of X running (ps -ef|grep X)
should show you if that is the case. There are logs in /var/log/X*
that will give more info. w/o more info, it is just a guess as to how
to 'fix'
 
> trying to get alien to install resulted in a report that the dependencies 
> were broken - apt-get was not able to get rpm which is needed for alien to 
> work.

aptitude is 'better' for ubuntu and what is recommend iirc. 
 
> another problem I had - part of the reason for tryign to upgrade - was 
> that I could not compile the tar.gz version of anything because the 
> install routines wanted to call cc and apparently my system has gcc and 
> is not set up to tell the installer routines that cc and gcc are the same.
> 
> I have a lot to learn.
> 
> right now I am booted off of the ubuntu installation on the backup 
> harddrive which is either dapper or edgy. i have not figured out which.

-- 
greg pryzby                              greg at pryzby dot org
fingerprint: 8A1A DB90 869F 5DD1 D6E9 EEB6 C156 6B04 849F A86F
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