Backing Up Haiku -or- The Clone Wars

Help
1

I have a challanging situation:
As a daily driver of Haiku for many years now I have an install with 1.2TB of data that I routinely backup using ‘rsync’. However, this does not result in a bootable drive. I believe it’s because the system files are in the “live” state while performing the backup as opposed to the packaged state the system normally boots in. (yes I installed boot files etc…)- the system starts to boot but hangs.

So I thought to run ‘Installer’ on the drive from my main install. Normally this would be a great solution because I can really get a bootable clone without having to reinstall everything. However, Installer seems to be having a hard time with 1.2TB of data… After an hour, the “Install Progress” meter shows no progress.

dd is a painfully slow and dangerous solution…

What would be the best way to get a bootable Haiku clone?

2

If you use rsync correctly (at least make sure you set the flags to not cross filesystem boundaries, preserve permissions and extended attributes. I’m not sure if more is needed.), I think all you need after rsync is done is to run makebootable on the target partition after the synchronization is complete. Installer doesn’t do anything more than that: copy the files and then run makebootable.

3

What’s the copy command that Installer uses? cp? any special flags? I could make a script from that…

4

It doesn’t use a command, it implements file copying directly in C++.

It also implements a few additional things, like ignoring some files and creating some empty directories if they are not there.

You can try to extract this info from the sourcecode:

https://cgit.haiku-os.org/haiku/tree/src/apps/installer/WorkerThread.cpp#n89

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5

So if I start with a clean install on my backup drive, I should be able to run rsync like this and end up with a bootable backup:

rsync -v -r -u -l --delete --exclude /boot/system/var/swap --exclude /boot/system/var/shared_memory --exclude /boot/system/var/log/syslog --exclude /boot/system/var/log/syslog.old /boot/system/ /$TARGET/system/ ;

rsync -v -r -u -l --delete /boot/home/ /$TARGET/home/ ;

6

Ad a call to makebootable and I think you have a good chance this will work. If not, a look at the syslog may help find what’s missing

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