* Brian Victor <bhv1@psu.edu> [20030317 12:07 PST]: > On Mon, Mar 17, 2003 at 09:43:09AM -0800, Vineet Kumar wrote: > >* Brian Victor <bhv1@psu.edu> [20030317 07:52 PST]: > >> I backed up my debian installation with the following: > >> > >> tar --preserve -cv / | ssh 192.168.2.10 'cat > linuxbackup.tar.bz2' > > > >That .bz2 extension on that file is misleading. The usual extension for > >uncompressed tar archives (which is what this line creates) is .tar . > > Oops, s/cat/bzip2/, as you figured out. See my other message for a way to do that using less bandwidth. > >Can you tell if the tarball actually has the symlinks in it but the > >restore messed up, or if the files are stored incorrectly and restored > >correctly? > > I don't know; is there any way to tell that in a compressed (or even a > decompressed) tarball? tar tjvf ball.tar.bz2 > >Then, in order to preserve them, you'll probably need another debian > >installation to figure out what they're supposed to be. Another thing > >you could try is to reinstall all of your packages. I would guess that > >this would take care of most of them. > > Yes, but it's difficult when some fundamental programs like awk, csh, > and yacc are broken. It's hard to tell what needs to be reinstalled > first. Also, as far as I can tell, I have to uninstall before > installing again, which can cause dependency messes. apt-get's --reinstall option will probably help you here. I wonder how badly it will break if many essential utilities (awk, sed?) are broken. Packages' install scripts may rely on those, and choke if they're not found. You may have to restore some of those bits manually along the way. -- http://www.doorstop.net/ -- http://www.aclu.org/ It's all about Freedom.
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