Re: Reconstructing Var?
On Thu, Mar 01, 2001 at 10:35:23PM -0900, Ethan Benson wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 02, 2001 at 07:29:21AM +0000, Matthew Sackman wrote:
> > >
> > > /usr/bin/yes make backups\!\!\!
> >
> > I'm a student = have no money for backup devices. Plus I'm still really
> > pissed off that I bought a 10gig 7200 rpm seagate about 3 days before a big
> > thread in here on how unreliable seagates are. Agh!
> >
> > Plus I have no IDE slots left so would have to buy a SCSI = very expensive.
> > poo :-(
>
> well in this case you should split off your partitions, create
> seperate / /tmp /usr /var and /home partitions. then backup /var (or
> just /var/lib/dpkg) to /home/backup/ *usually* filesystem corruption
> does not end up wrecking all your filesystems at the same time, so if
> only /var gets trashed (in this case) you still have a backup in
> /home/backup.
>
> if the disk dies your screwed, but this method protects you from
> filesystem corruption fairly well.
Well yes: currently I use eight partitions, including one /misc which I
can use for backups of non-really-big stuff:
matthew@namkas:~$ df
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdb8 1542156 326000 1216156 22% /
/dev/hdb5 15522 2674 12047 19% /boot
/dev/hdb7 1028092 110340 917752 11% /misc
/dev/hdb9 4883556 1128692 3754864 24% /usr
/dev/hdd5 101485 29 96216 1% /tmp
/dev/hdd6 512012 116200 395812 23% /root
/dev/hdd7 717636 486296 231340 68% /var
/dev/hdd8 1552236 993120 559116 64% /home
When /var went down, I was able to tar and bzip2 up /home /etc /root
and drop them into a windows partition which meant that I lost no real
work - only work done on setting up debian was lost - no school work
or such like. Unfortunately, I did have to let go to my mp3 collection:
bzip2 couldn't handle a tar file that big....!
But yes, I suppose the only precaution I can take is to back up the
very important stuff to /misc. I guess I really should write a script
to do that and then fire it off from cron every couple of days....
Any ideas about an effective scipt to do this? Any recommended programs?
Matthew
PS: One other advantage of partitioning this heavily is that when I was
writing some web perl scripts a couple of months ago and made a recursive
error, /var rapidly filled as apache got screwed with firing out error
messages. But the machine didn't crash: I suspect things would have got
a lot nastier if I hadn't got /var on a seperate partition.
--
Matthew Sackman
Nottingham,
ENGLAND
Using Debian/GNU Linux
Enjoying computing
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