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Thinking About Backups—Day 46© Copyright Darrell Anderson. Some time ago I mentioned my concern for how I will be able to update my Slackware environment. I am on dial-up and cannot perform real-time updates online. For smaller files I can do that, but not with large additions such as a major KDE update release. However, I found a nice handy tool that runs within the KDE environment called Kslackcheck. This little tool provides a KDE front-end to a script that checks the current change log and reports on what files could be updated. The script does not report everything in the change log, but only those files installed on my system. I have tested this with a few small files. The script launches Kget to download files. The script performs no automatic updates and I like this. After downloading, I run the standard upgradepkg tool to install the updated program. The authors are Italian and the English translation needs some grammatical editing, but the program works great. Once enhancement I’d like to see is the script report the file size. Being on dial-up this is important to me. Another way I have occupied my time is I testing K3B as mortal user. I had no problems whatsoever! I have burned several data CDs without a hitch. Scratch another item from the migration to-do list. When I created my partitions I created a large 8GB /home partition. I have no intention of filling this partition, but originally I had other ideas. One of those ideas was to create a temporary backup location. In my NT4 system, I have a dedicated partition for temporary backups. I use that location to backup my registry when I want to tinker and I use that location to backup any document located in my “Writing projects” directory. I use the NT4 scheduler to run a script that looks to see if my Word normal template is open and if so, copy all changed files to my temporary backup location. I run this script hourly. Every other day or so I run a differential backup to archive all files, but this short-term backup solution has bailed me several times. Not from computer crashes—my system is incredibly stable, but from my own tomfoolery and absent-mindedness. I wanted to create a similar strategy in Slackware. So I created a new directory in /home called archives. Because I am not yet up to speed with writing bash scripts, currently I use the Konqueror file manager to copy files to this location. I will one day automate this process, but for now I am satisfying my intention to protect myself from my migration experiments. Indeed, I already have used this process to rescue myself. I have been having more problems with Firefox than I ever encountered in Windows, and I was trying to fine tune my setup. For some strange reason, Firefox got hung up while installing new extensions and refused to recognize that the extensions were already installed. Unlike my past practice in Windows, I had not created a backup of my Firefox profile before I started mucking around. For a moment I thought I was hosed and would have to reinstall everything from scratch—the infamous and absurd Firefox solution of creating a new profile. Then I remembered that I had a backup—in /home/archives. I copied and pasted and all I had to do thereafter was reinstall the had dozen extensions I previously failed to install. In like Flynn. Never underestimate the power and relief that backups provide! Of course, on my to-do list is spending time writing some bash scripts to backup my system in a more automated fashion. I’ll get there eventually! However, as a side note to this adventure, after I initially had created /home/archives, I then created a new group called archivers. I added my mortal user to this group. Backups are too critical to have to play the su root game all the time to perform backups. I then changed ownership of /home/archives to archivers. I ran into permission problems the first time I tried copying and deleting files as mortal user. I was stumped for a while. Then I realized that the first time I had copied files I had done so as root. Although the /home/archives directory was assigned ownership to the archivers group, all of the files underneath was owned by the root group. I then changed ownership of everything to archivers and then had no further problems. I also created a mirror image of my Slackware partitions. Because I use several multiple partitions, I use a separate partition for my Slackware /var, /usr, and root partitions. I copied those three partitions to empty space on my hard drive. Then I wrote a backup fstab file to recognize the new locations. I then added separate GRUB menu.lst options for this backup edition of Slackware. Now, should I hose my Slackware boot sequence, I can boot into my backup copy and correct my errors. This is the same philosophy I have used for several years with NT4 by using a second alternate boot partition. The philosophy merely provides me a back door into my own system. Finis. |
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