Author: Ladislav Slezak < lslezak@suse.cz>
Changes:
Note: YaST2 backup module does not replace other backup utilities! The YaST2 backup module is a small, easy-to-use backup program. If you need advanced features, such as incremental backup or network backup, you should use another expert tool.
YaST2 backup module searches system for files which should be backed up and creates archive from them. The archive contains modified files (which were modified since system installation or package update), files not owned by any package can be optionally added to archive. Critical system disk areas can be added to archive too.
Backup archive contains additional information to see when or on which system archive was created, etc.
At first dialog user can enter some propeties of created archive - file name, comment which will be stored in the archive, etc. Archive type determine type of created archive, which utility will be used for creating archive.
Changed files which belong to one package are stored to one subarchive. All package archives and additional files are archived to one big archive by tar utility. Currently supported archive types:
Archive can be splitted to more smaller parts. This is usefule if archive does not fit to one medium. Size of one part can be selected from predefined media or manually selected. Select 'User defined' as volume size to set arbitrary volume size in the text area below.
Predefined floppy disk sizes are for MS-DOS formatted disks, if another file system is used its size have to be manually entered, because it can (and probably will) have different free space for user data.
User defined size can be entered as number of bytes, kilobytes, etc. Units with 'i' in their abbreviation are power of 2, units without 'i' are power of 10 -- 1 kB is 1000 bytes, 1kiB is 1024 bytes, etc. Number can be entered in floating point format, values 1e3 bytes or 0.5 MiB are valid. Tar writes files in 10 kiB blocks (default), so created volumes can be slightly smaller then entered value.
Archive volumes are named <archive_directory><volume_number><archive_basename>. Backup module does not do any check if there is available free space - all volumes have to be stored on the disk and then moved to the floppy disks.
There are options for selecting which parts of the system will be backed up in this dialog. Checking some options results in more dialogs in the workflow - more information from user is required.
Searching files which do not belong to any package needs lots of memory, because list of all installed files have to be read to it.
Rpm utility is used to search modified files. It allows verifying installed packages by comparing current file attributes with attributes stored in RPM database. Changed files are be detected by different MD5 sum attributes. Computing MD5 sum takes lot of time, so it can be replaced by only comparing size and modification time attributes, but it is less reliable.
If backing up files not owned by any package is selected, then it can be usefull to set which directories shoud not be backed up (e.g. /tmp)
In Expert settings can be selected file systems instead of directories. Default excluded file system is iso9660 and file systems with "nodev" flag in /proc/filesystems (e.g. nfs, proc, shm, ...). Root directory '/' is searched always, even if its file system is selected.
Seaching files starts after all unnecessary information is collected. During searching current action or progress is displayed.
If user requested to check list of found files then user can select which files from found ones will be backed up.
Here are displayed results of creating archive.
Files can be restored from backup archive by Yast2 Restore module or manually using tar/star utility.
Other information about YaST2 backup moudule can be found in Backup module specification. If you have another questions or notes contact author please.