OSBackup

The goal of OSBackup is to restore (or clone) your Linux-based system with minimal storage requirements. It works by capturing metadata of your block devices and compiling minimal scripts to re-create the same structure on the new disks.

It is available under GNU General Public License.

Note: The current version is a working prototype. It is far from production usage. Testers wanted.

Technologies

The following structures are scanned and restored (respecting any dependency between them).

• Partition tables of block devices (through sfdisk).
• Raid arrays compatible with mdadm.
• Logical volumes using LVM.
• Encrypted devices using dm_crypt (the user will be prompted for the new passphrases).
• File systems, as long as they are ext* or vfat.
• Grub boot loader.

Restore process

The ideal restore environment is a live CD with the same distribution the backed-up system is running.

The script will first scan for the binaries it will use (like cryptsetup or mkfs.ext4) and complain if something is not available. At this point you have to add the packages providing these commands (e.g. apt-get install lvm2).

If everything is available, the script will re-create all the structures, make all the file systems, mount them, extract the gzipped tarball with the files and re-install Grub in a chrooted environment.

Your system should be available after a reboot (at least in theory).

Usage

You just have to run the osbackup shellscript. It will put everything you need under the restore folder (including a large gzip archive with all the files which were not explicitly excluded, like /tmp and friends).

It worth mentioning that the script will keep the metadata files under the metadata directory, so if the automatic process fails to restore something you can do it manually using this information (like what UUID a file system should have).

Simply running the restore shell script in the restore directory should finish the process.

Notes

• You can add any additional directories to the exclude list using the TAR_FLAGS environment variabale, which will be appended to the tar command line. For example: --exclude=/home (because there are better tools to take care of often changing data).
• If your backup archive (root.tar.gz) is located somewhere else than the restore script, you can add that filename as the first parameter after restore.