[Savannah-hackers-public] Re: [gnu.org #332109] rsync backup --exclude

[Sylvain Beucler]

Hi jag,

That was not sufficient last time (Justin had to do something, ssh
couldn't start because of a missing urandom), plus you'd have to
manage all the vservers (or other virtualized subsystems) as well
which are not necessarily in known locations.

That's why I recommend including /dev in the backup (excluding
/dev/pts). I also find it less error-prone; using MAKEDEV looks like
an additional and unnecessary step. What kind of issue did you get
when including /dev? Not including them looks like a loose-loose
situation. I restored a computer not earlier than yesterday using a
/dev-enabled backup, I got no issue.


I'm just trying to avoid the issues we got during the Savannah
recovery. If you're this won't happen again, no problem.

Cheers,

-- 
Sylvain
PS: To clarify what I said earlier, IMHO Debian's initrd images will
need a minimal /dev/ whether using udev or not.


On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 02:49:23PM -0400, Joshua Ginsberg via RT wrote:
> Debian does need these when it's not using udev. And Debian provides the
> MAKEDEV script for creating the necessary device files. Our restoration
> instructions include the execution of this script for systems that do
> not use udev. We believe this to be sufficient.
> 
> -jag
> 
> > [beuc - Thu Mar 22 14:36:16 2007]:
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > We saw last week that the Savannah backup currently excludes /dev
> > directories.
> > 
> > I believe Debian generally needs those (for example I remember that a
> > Debian kernel wouldn't work on Fedora until I populated the FC /dev) -
> > even if udev can be started later on.
> > 
> > On my personal experience excluding /dev/pts is sufficient; /dev
> > itself can be backed-up without problem for rsync.
> > 
> > Can you update the exclusion rules?
> > 
> > Thanks,