Restore dar easily in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, or not?

Update 1: I got the dapper version of kdar to work. I never tried it because I didn’t think it would work. But the packages installed without any trouble and works just as good as in Ubuntu 9.10.

Update 2: I also tried pybackpack that is a nice gui
for manual backups using rdiff-backup. Rdiff-backup can do remote backup using ssh but needs rdiff-backup installed on both client and server. It’s somewhat similar to rsync in that aspect. Pybackpack I had to pull from the SVN repos, since the packages that exist had major bugs relating to gui-changes causing it to be broken. Pybackpack project site: http://projects.sucs.org/projects/pybackpack/

Update 3: Using archfs on my backupserver I can get the backup-images fuse-mounted and have direct file access to all previously backed file-versions. There are two views that one can mount using options. One show each file as a directory containg all versions of that file with a date+timestamp, and there is the default view that shows date+timestamps as directorys in the root of the mountpoint and below the directory structure as it where for that specific backup. Since my backup-server is a Debian Lenny I had to pull the archfs-package from the unstable repository (I changed the /etc/apt/sources.list to include an unstable-source during the install, and then removed it).

I never tried sbackup since it doesn’t match my needs.


Ok so it seems I might have been praised the use of dar alittle to soon in my previous post. Well at least the use of kdar as of now. I’m having trouble getting it to run on Ubuntu 10.04.

And all that my major research-crawling gives me is Dargui, (gnome/gtk gui) that also won’t work (yet) in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

And I also found a completely different approach: rdiff-backup with archfs.

I will probably end up extracting my dar-archive completely or zip it or something (i only want to archive this backup set of my old laptop-installation of 9.10). And then I will try archfs for incremental backups of my current setup.

I will post a follow up on this when I have it done.

And yeah, if you only want to backup a few files easily there should be an option in Ubuntu 10.04… I think it’s called sbackup. There also some backintime project and dejadup that I have to look into.

To be continued…

Backup Linux-system using DAR

You gotta love dar!

Do yourself a favour and hit a “apt-get install dar kdar; man dar”, and engulf yourself in it’s possibilities. Or just take a glipmse at the features here.
And if you are like me, and just want the job done, take a look at kdar (a gui).
I just finished a kdar-backup of my laptop, ran from a script created with kdar with some additions (removal of -p option and addition of –exclude-file option).
dar -v -c “/media/externaldrive/dar/d420.u910.root.100606” -R “/” -s 734003200 -D -y -m 150 -Z “*.avi” -Z “*.bz2” -Z “*.deb” -Z “*.gif” -Z “*.gz” -Z “*.iso” -Z “*.jpg” -Z “*.mov” -Z “*.mpg” -Z “*.pbm” -Z “*.pdf” -Z “*.png” -Z “*.pnm” -Z “*.Z” -Z “*.zip” -P “media/externaldrive/dar” -P “dev” -P “dev/pts” -P “dev/shm” -P “lib/init/rw” -P “media” -P “mnt” -P “proc” -P “sys” -P “tmp” -P “var/lock” -P “var/run” -P “var/tmp” –exclude-file=excludefiles
Pretty basic right? =)
And look at this beauty of summary generated when finished:

361049 inode(s) saved
with 421 hard link(s) recorded
0 inode(s) changed at the moment of the backup
0 inode(s) not saved (no inode/file change)
1 inode(s) failed to save (filesystem error)
10 inode(s) ignored (excluded by filters)
0 inode(s) recorded as deleted from reference backup
——————————————–
Total number of inodes considered: 361060
——————————————–
EA saved for 0 inode(s)
——————————————–

I’m planning to use a script like this one generating an excludefile to exclude all package-installed files:

#!/bin/bash
COLUMNS=185 dpkg -l|awk ‘/^ii/{ print $2 }’|xargs -l dpkg -L|sort -u > dpkg-files

LampKontroll v0.1 done!

It’s not pretty codewise, and it could use some ajax, but at least the iWebkit makes it look ok and it’s functional. And it works on both iPhone and ofcourse android and other browsers as well 🙂

Compiling Xen Linux-kernel – Ubuntu Intrepid

I need to compile a 2.6.27 xen-kernel to upgrade because I have problems getting nfsv4 to work on my current setup. I am following this guide.

I’m writing this because I had problems when compiling. I got an error on the common_64.o. I didn’t find anything when searching this error. So I was grateful when I found this post, that led me past the error. In this post the option CONFIG_IA32_EMULATION=y is mentioned. And when I activate that option in menuconfig, I can continue compiling.

update 090712: I managed to compile the kernel. I also found a post explaining that my problem booting a standard Ubuntu-kernel in a domU shouldn’t exist. This led me to do another search for reasons why my domU wouldn’t boot. And as I found out, ofcourse, my only problem is that I don’t get any console (as in xvc0.., xm console). I haven’t sorted that out yet. I will update when I do. The updated kernel, a 2.6.27-14-server from ubuntu repos., made my nfs-problems disappear. =) \o/ I will now proceed with getting nfs4 and with auth against Zeroshell krb5 working.

Get more free disk space!

It seems that the days when you needed to keep you computer clean and tidy are gone. With the operatingsystems only require a few percent of your harddrive this might be less of a problem. But my experience is that it still fills up and you may lose focus from the “system-near” files and
only try to clean up your other data (like larger mediafiles or old backups).

I most recently used this tool when my Windows-partition on my work-laptop.

jDiskReport
– Cross platform using java (Mac/Windows/Linux)

There are many similar tools for both Windows and Linux. jDiskReport is the best free one I’ve found.
In Ubuntu you can install a gnome tool but I don’t remember the name of the package right now. I will update this when I do. For KDE there is Filelight. But I haven’t tried it yet.

This Google-page has a summary of a bunch.

Using digikam in hardy to convert Canon G10 CR2 RAW photos to jpeg.

I found myself in a bit of a dilemma again because I’m still running Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) on my server. In the long run I will probably migrate my Xen-machines to running on KVM in line with Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04. But for now that’s another project.

I have a Digikam installation on a Ubuntu Hardy that runs quite well. My problem recently arose when I tried to convert RAW images with the built in rawconverter (residing in the kipi-plugins package). I also tried using plainly dcraw wich is the utility that the rawconverter plugin is based on. Both of them returns an image that has a yellow tint. Diggin further I have come to the conclusion that new support for my camera is added in dcraw 8.89 and therefor I’m trying to build my own updated support for this into Digikam so that I can convert theese images until I decide to upgrade to the latest stable Ubuntu, Jaunty (9.04) or later.

I have succeded in compiling kipi-plugins and required packages that didn’t already exist or needed update. The problem now is that it seems like i need to upgrade Digikam too because it crashes using the new kipi-plugins.

My conclusion now is that I am probably better off trying to get that machine upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty.

Kommande filmer att se pÄ bio

1 maj: X-Men Origins: Wolverine
8 maj: Star Trek
29 maj: Terminator Salvation
5 juni: Underworld: The Rise of the Lycans
26 juni: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
10 juli: Ice Age III: Det vÄras för dinosaurierna

Dessa kanske Vi gĂ„r pĂ„… =) Vill Du/Ni följa med?