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I started playing with Gentoo on a 20 Gig hard disk and, unsurprisingly,
it's run out of space! Is there any easy way of migrating my system over
to another disk without installing from scratch?

Andrew Walker wrote:
> I started playing with Gentoo on a 20 Gig hard disk and, unsurprisingly,
> it's run out of space! Is there any easy way of migrating my system over
> to another disk without installing from scratch?

There are many methods, you can use dd, tar, cp and many more commands to do
the copy of your old data. If you boot tour system and make your copies, then
see to not "copy" /proc and /sys, as those directories will contain "streams"
and will just fill your new harddrive with nonsens untill it's completly full.

If you boot from Gentoo isntall CD and preform the "copy" from there, then you
don't have to worry as much about the proc and sys that is on your 20GB
harddrive (just avoid to copy the system thats on the CD).


//Aho

So anyway, it was like, 15:54 CEST Apr 01 2005, you know? Oh, and, yeah,
Andrew Walker was all like, "Dude,

> I started playing with Gentoo on a 20 Gig hard disk and,
> unsurprisingly,

Actually it is rather surprising.

> it's run out of space! Is there any easy way of migrating my system
> over to another disk without installing from scratch?

Before you do that, make sure to clean out /usr/portage/distfiles and
/var/tmp/portage. I can't really see how you'd manage to run out of
disk unless you're stockpiling distfiles or keeping workdirs around.

If that doesn't do it, post some more info about your choice of
partitioning and the output of 'du -sk /*' and maybe someone can help
you figure out exactly where you've accumulated all that bloat.

That being said, tar, cpio and even cp -a might do for a migration.

--
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. Perth ---> *
16:55:59 up 159 days, 4:22, 11 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Linux 2.6.9 x86_64 GNU/Linux Registered Linux user #261729

Johan Lindquist enlightened us with:
>> I started playing with Gentoo on a 20 Gig hard disk and,
>> unsurprisingly,
>
> Actually it is rather surprising.

Why? I've got about 15 GB of games alone - UT2004 and Neverwinter
Nights. Besides that I've got a MPEG2 encoding TV card which I use to
record shows, like a computer version of a VCR. That's about 10 GB per
movie, untill I compress them. It's easy to fill up so much space!

Sybren
--
The problem with the world is stupidity. Not saying there should be a
capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the
safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?

On Fri, 01 Apr 2005 16:59:57 +0200, Johan Lindquist wrote:

> So anyway, it was like, 15:54 CEST Apr 01 2005, you know? Oh, and, yeah,
> Andrew Walker was all like, "Dude,
>
>> I started playing with Gentoo on a 20 Gig hard disk and,
>> unsurprisingly,
>
> Actually it is rather surprising.
>
>> it's run out of space! Is there any easy way of migrating my system
>> over to another disk without installing from scratch?
>
> Before you do that, make sure to clean out /usr/portage/distfiles and
> /var/tmp/portage. I can't really see how you'd manage to run out of
> disk unless you're stockpiling distfiles or keeping workdirs around.
>
> If that doesn't do it, post some more info about your choice of
> partitioning and the output of 'du -sk /*' and maybe someone can help
> you figure out exactly where you've accumulated all that bloat.
>
> That being said, tar, cpio and even cp -a might do for a migration.


Thanks, that's freed about 10 Gig!
As I may migrate anyway, I need to do a backup. Can you recommend an easy
(i.e GUI) backup tool? I want to backup to another ext3 disk but I'm
worried that using tar files in a terminal may be beyond me!
Ideally I want a package that will easily backup my system through a GUI
and if my x-server fails can be restored via a terminal.
By the way, is there a way of making tar files corruption proof, I've
used par tools with windows in the past in case the tar file becomes
corrupted. Also is there a file size limit to ext3, I backed up to a
fat32 file system once and as the tar file was over 4Gig I lost the
entire backup!

Hi!
Since I'm thinking of moving from Mandrake to Gentoo in the next couple
of weeks, I did some research on the possibilities of archiving my files.

First there are the traditional tools like dd, cp, tar, cpio, dump, etc.
They were already mentioned... I don't think I can give you more info
than you can find in man/info/previous postings.
I have used tar for some time now, but I'm not very happy with it. It's
a powerful tool and I can set a lot of include/exclude rules, date
checks and so on. The problem is that I forget what settings I used for
my previous archive and even when I find the note, the command line is
just too long. If looking for a gui tool - may be ark (KDE tool) can
help?? Not sure I prefer dealing with these on the command line.

There's a tool called 'Mondo Rescue'. It consists of two parts. Mondo is
the tool to create the archives, and there's a tool (mindi) which scans
your system (kernel, modules, partitions) and prepares a boot disk
images. You can (either yourself or you can let mondo do it) record
archive on CDs and make the first one bootable. It is said that this can
work well with raid and lvm. I think it's a good choice when you archive
to cd-r(w) (great automation), but it also supports NFS and any place on
your tree (any partition/disk mounted). No GUI! Sorry! But it uses
interface with menus (similar to Midnight commander) and you will not
feel very miserable

The third option is dar. It's just between tar and mondo. Like tar it's
very flexible with great options for include/exclude, differential
archives. And like mondo it allows you to split archive in chunks and
gives you the option of leaving space for a boot-image (in case you're
archiving to CDs or kind of). It has a great documentation set and
offers good scripting options (along with some sample scripts). If
possible it compiles a static version that'll run from any linux and I'm
very impressed with it (so deep that I'll use it for my next
full-data-archive in a day or two). If looking for GUI frontend - try
KDar (I haven't tested it for it doesn't run on KDE 3.2, but it seems
quite popular).

Hope this'll help you!
Good luck
Andrew Ivanov

Andrew Walker wrote:
> Thanks, that's freed about 10 Gig!
> As I may migrate anyway, I need to do a backup. Can you recommend an easy
> (i.e GUI) backup tool? I want to backup to another ext3 disk but I'm
> worried that using tar files in a terminal may be beyond me!
> Ideally I want a package that will easily backup my system through a GUI
> and if my x-server fails can be restored via a terminal.
> By the way, is there a way of making tar files corruption proof, I've
> used par tools with windows in the past in case the tar file becomes
> corrupted. Also is there a file size limit to ext3, I backed up to a
> fat32 file system once and as the tar file was over 4Gig I lost the
> entire backup!

Andrew Walker wrote:
> On Fri, 01 Apr 2005 16:59:57 +0200, Johan Lindquist wrote:
>
>
>>So anyway, it was like, 15:54 CEST Apr 01 2005, you know? Oh, and, yeah,
>>Andrew Walker was all like, "Dude,
>>
>>
>>>I started playing with Gentoo on a 20 Gig hard disk and,
>>>unsurprisingly,
>>
>>Actually it is rather surprising.
>>
>>
>>>it's run out of space! Is there any easy way of migrating my system
>>>over to another disk without installing from scratch?
>>
>>Before you do that, make sure to clean out /usr/portage/distfiles and
>>/var/tmp/portage. I can't really see how you'd manage to run out of
>>disk unless you're stockpiling distfiles or keeping workdirs around.
>>
>>If that doesn't do it, post some more info about your choice of
>>partitioning and the output of 'du -sk /*' and maybe someone can help
>>you figure out exactly where you've accumulated all that bloat.
>>
>>That being said, tar, cpio and even cp -a might do for a migration.
>
>
>
> Thanks, that's freed about 10 Gig!
> As I may migrate anyway, I need to do a backup. Can you recommend an easy
> (i.e GUI) backup tool? I want to backup to another ext3 disk but I'm
> worried that using tar files in a terminal may be beyond me!
> Ideally I want a package that will easily backup my system through a GUI
> and if my x-server fails can be restored via a terminal.
> By the way, is there a way of making tar files corruption proof, I've
> used par tools with windows in the past in case the tar file becomes
> corrupted. Also is there a file size limit to ext3, I backed up to a
> fat32 file system once and as the tar file was over 4Gig I lost the
> entire backup!
>
>

I reckon the easiest and best backup tool in the world is rsync. It's so
fast and smart and I've never had it break on me at all. Just use this one:
rsync -avu --progress <src> <dest>
and if over a network:
rsync -avue ssh --progress <user>@<host>:<src> <user>@<host>:<dest>
and if you want to do a dry run first just to test it will put files
where you want, just add a -n at the end so it can be easily deleted
when you go back through your command history to do the real thing. I
love it so much I mostly use it instead of cp.

As for partition images, there's a good gui (ncurses) tool to use. It
even comes on Knoppix (don't try backing up a mounted filesystem
please). It's called partimage and can even restore partitions to a
different (try bigger) size. It also compresses the partitions on the
fly. It's alot like Norton Ghost which is considered the bees knees of
partition imaging.

p.s. Here is a script which does incremental backups, showing the true
awsomeness of rsync:

#!/bin/bash
# Incremental backup snapshot script v1.0

RM="/bin/rm -rf"
MV="/bin/mv"
MKDIR="/bin/mkdir -p -m 0700"

#### User definable parameters ####
SNAPSHOT_DEPTH=4

function assign_vars()
{
for (( i=0; i <= $SNAPSHOT_DEPTH; i++))
do
SNAPSHOT[$i]="$SNAPSHOT_DIR/$i"
done

}

function create_dirs()
{
for dir in ${SNAPSHOT[@]}
do
if ! test -d $dir
then
echo "creating directory $dir"
$MKDIR $dir
fi
done
}

function rotate_dirs()
{
# remove snapshots that are too old
if test -d ${SNAPSHOT[$SNAPSHOT_DEPTH]}
then
echo "deleting ${SNAPSHOT[$SNAPSHOT_DEPTH]}"
$RM ${SNAPSHOT[$SNAPSHOT_DEPTH]}
fi

for (( i=$SNAPSHOT_DEPTH; i > 0; ))
do
j=$((i--));
if test -d ${SNAPSHOT[$i]}
then
echo "moving ${SNAPSHOT[$i]} to ${SNAPSHOT[$j]}"
$MV ${SNAPSHOT[$i]} ${SNAPSHOT[$j]}
fi

done
}

COMMAND=$(basename $0 .sh)
if [ $COMMAND == transfer ]
then
SNAPSHOT_TARGET="bitslor:/home/transfer"
elif [ $COMMAND == ben ]
then
SNAPSHOT_TARGET="maclor:/Users/ben/"
elif [ $COMMAND == josh ]
then
SNAPSHOT_TARGET="bitslor:/home/josh/"
elif [ $COMMAND == public ]
then
SNAPSHOT_TARGET="bitslor:/home/public/"
else
exit 0
fi

SNAPSHOT_ROOT="/mnt/backup"
SNAPSHOT_DIR="$SNAPSHOT_ROOT/$COMMAND"

assign_vars
create_dirs

if rsync -avre ssh --progress --stats --link-dest=${SNAPSHOT[1]}
$SNAPSHOT_TARGET ${SNAPSHOT[0]}
then
rotate_dirs
elif test -d ${SNAPSHOT[0]}
then
echo "deleting ${SNAPSHOT[0]}"
$RM ${SNAPSHOT[0]}
fi

Andrew Walker wrote:

> As I may migrate anyway, I need to do a backup. Can you recommend an easy
> (i.e GUI) backup tool? I want to backup to another ext3 disk but I'm
> worried that using tar files in a terminal may be beyond me!

tar -cf mytarball.tar /path/to/what/I/want/to/tar
/path/to/somethingt/else/I/want/to/tar /path/to/somethingt/other/I/want/to/tar


> Ideally I want a package that will easily backup my system through a GUI
> and if my x-server fails can be restored via a terminal.

You can use Gentoo (not the distro, but the file managementa program), has
option for tar.


> By the way, is there a way of making tar files corruption proof, I've
> used par tools with windows in the past in case the tar file becomes
> corrupted.

There are many reasons why a file would get corrupt, so no matter what program
you run, you can generate corrupt files.


> Also is there a file size limit to ext3, I backed up to a
> fat32 file system once and as the tar file was over 4Gig I lost the
> entire backup!

2T I think the limit is.


//Aho

On Fri, 01 Apr 2005 13:54:06 +0000, Andrew Walker wrote:

> I started playing with Gentoo on a 20 Gig hard disk and, unsurprisingly,
> it's run out of space! Is there any easy way of migrating my system over
> to another disk without installing from scratch?

I had a similar problem so I used the howto at
http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Mov...hard_disk.html
and adapted it for Gentoo use

Boot into the Gentoo live CD, create partitions on the new disk, mount
the new partitions, copy your system across, chroot, and re-install Grub.
Then you should be happily using a new Hard Disk.

--
Jafar Calley
Producer - http://moonlife-records.com
--------------------------------------
See the latest Mars and Saturn images
http://fatcat.homelinux.org