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Making an eCS-OS/2 full image backup

Started by miturbide, 2010.03.17, 21:12:44

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miturbide

Hi

Which do you guys suggest will be the best way today to make an eComStation or OS/2 Warp 4.5 full image backup for a machine.

I used to create a backup with an old drive image software, but since it is too old and the newer versions just ignored ecs-os2, i don't know which will be best way to do it today.

The other I never tried it to make a zip file with all the ecs-os2 files, but I never tried that.

What do you have in mind ?

Possible I will write an Wiki article about this, if there is nothing written about it.
Martín Itúrbide
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Open Source Advocate

Skype - martiniturbide
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melf

Hi Martin, I used an application called "Iris" lately, http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/h-search.php?key=iris_01&pushbutton=Search . It makes an xtracompressed zip of the whole boot drive. You can probably easy change the config file to also process other drives.

To recover I just installed eCS as usual (I reorganized my partitions, so I had to reinstall). When done I booted with cd and choosed "system management" and then used the archiver-program to unzip it on my boot drive. Worked splendid!

The zip-file was quite small, about 800 MB for the whole boot drive (unzipped its about 2GB).

/Mikael

ivan

Hi Martin,

Each of the machines here - all OS/2 - has a bootable CD with a zip file of the OS partition including the ROBOSAVE dir.

We have used them in a few cases when changing the HD.  Total down time is in the order of 20 minutes including changing the disk.  All have worked as normal on restart.  

I've also used the CD of one machine to clone the OS to machines with the same configuration, again without problems - changing machine name before connecting to the DHCP network.

miturbide

Thanks Melf I will give Iris a try.

Ivan, which software are you using? also Iris ?
Martín Itúrbide
OS2World.com NewsMaster
Open Source Advocate

Skype - martiniturbide
Google Talk - martiniturbide@gmail.com

Pete

Hi melf

Quote from: melf on 2010.03.17, 22:29:04

To recover I just installed eCS as usual (I reorganized my partitions, so I had to reinstall).


Would it not have been easier to simply change the Volume drive letter(s) as required?

Regards

Pete

melf

This is an OT discussion but anyway:

My work demanded a copy of XP, so I could use video conference apps, and I had to make room for that. As I have all my data on another partition I backed up my boot-partition, deleted it and made two new. This was the reorganization :)
/Mikael

ivan

Hi Martin,

The software I use is ROBOSAVE 3.04 (EWS) for backing up the desktop and just plain zip for zipping up the boot partition.  The bootable CD was produced with bootAble and everything is run from a very simple CMD script I wrote.

Looking at Iris I see someone had the same idea - except for the bootable CD part. 

I have been doing the zipping of the boot partition since the advent of Warp3 and added the boot CD when Hayo Baan produced bootAble.  Before bootAble I used a modified version of the instructions from Cdboot2 by Roman Stangal.

I hope this answers your question

Andi

For expected archive sizes <2GB I use zip -rS9. This includes the system partitions which are always smaller than 1GB on my systems. In case of restore needed, I boot a maintenance partition which is also set up on most of my systems or start from the eCS CD. Warp 4.5 boot CD should be fine too. On a cmd prompt 'unzip ...' and you're done. On rare cases a sysinstx is necessary too. On new harddisks I partitioning with DFSee in advance and save the partition info within DFSee with psave.

For data and program partitions I use 'rar a -rv2000m ...' which is way slower as zip but can split to 2GB chunks. Maybe the newest zip versions can do that too, but not sure about that.

OT: I back up Windoze NTFS partitions (I use NTFS on the Thinkpads as boot partition only) with DFSee - image. And Windoze data/program partitions (FAT32 in my case) with rar/zip from eCS or WinRar.

Johannes

Hello Martin,
I am using backup/restore included in OS/2 and eCS. It is also on the eCS 2.0 Silver CD.

Examples:

backup x: y: /s

restore y: x: /s

Restored backup is bootable. For backing up data partitions you don't have to boot from CD.

regards

miturbide

Thanks

Johannes, I never used the backup / restore commands, what kind of file does it produces ? zip ?
Martín Itúrbide
OS2World.com NewsMaster
Open Source Advocate

Skype - martiniturbide
Google Talk - martiniturbide@gmail.com

Johannes

Hello Martin,
backup.exe will create a directory on the backup partition with the name 'backup'. This will contain the files control.001 and backup.001, containing the backup data uncompressed. It is possible to restore single directories or single files:

restore y: x:\directory /s
restore y: x:\directory\file.xyz

For multiple backup sets just rename the directory. There is more information in the OS/2 command reference, but the only important thing is to use the switch /s for subdirectories.

For me it is a very useful program and I wonder why it is so unknown.

regards

Johannes

Pete

Hi Johannes

Maybe backup.exe simply does not get used by many people due to the following in the Command Reference:-

BACKUP does not back up the system files (COMMAND.COM and CMD.EXE), hidden system files, and any open dynamic link library files (.DLL). BACKUP also does not back up any files opened with Deny Read/Write. BACKUP issues a system message if you try to back up one of these files.


Looks like using backup.exe doe not produce a full backup...

Regards

Pete

Johannes

Hello Pete,
to avoid this and backup every file on your boot drive you have to boot from floppy or CD.

regards

Johannes

RobertM

Two warnings to those who plan on using the ZIP method...


  • You MUST ensure that the versions of ZIP and UNZIP you use support writing files greater than 4GB unless you have a really small partition.

  • You must of course also ensure that the backup drive supports files greater than 4GB or the ZIP'ping will fail when it hits HPFS's file size limit.

Otherwise, works well... I also find that writing/using a simple REXX script to zip things by main directory helps and is easier and a little quicker...

Inotherwords:

  • Read the files in the root directory and Zip them into one zip file (eg: Root_Drive_Y.zip)

  • Read the directory tree of Drive Y:

  • For each directory in the root of the drive (eg: OS2, MPTN, TCPIP) zip it and all it's contents (including sub-directories) to files of the same name (with extension added)... eg: OS2.zip, MPTN.zip, TCPIP.zip, etc.

  • Remember to include all the necessary options to ensure all files (hidden, system, etc) and all directories (including empty ones) and all extended attributes are copied.

  • Then, I simply run the script and output the ZIP file backups to a JFS drive...



Anyways, that's the way I do it when I need compression... it's really two simple SysFileTree calls (one with a loop to go through the list of directories in the root of the drive - the other with no loop which just returns files in the root of the drive).


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