norestore

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: norestore
started by: mikshaw

Posted by mikshaw on Dec. 20 2004,15:19

I just discovered the norestore option by accident. I've been messing around with backups on hda4 while designing my next custom CD, and today I ran into a snag. While trying out v0.9.1 i booted up with no boot option, assuming that I would get a fresh and clean default system. Nope....X failed to load. After messing around with different settings for 20 minutes, I looked into .xinitrc to discover it's the same one stored on my backup drive? How in the -- ?? Okay, that's cool...must be some autosearch for a backup partition. But why did it only copy .xinitrc? So I looked in /mnt/hda4/backup.tar.gz and found only a fraction of the files which were in it last night when I booted with mydsl=hda4.

Anyway....let's try keeping this short, shall we....
What it comes down to is that when you use the mydsl boot option, apparently 'backup' comes along for the ride. I didn't expect this...I assumed that any backup would be manual, so each time you boot with mydsl=hda4 you'd be using the same backup.tar.gz (unless you intentionally change it). This isn't a huge problem now that I know what to expect, but it makes me think the process could be improved.

What I'm thinking is the creation of filetool.lst could be changed a little. Ideally, rather than being simply copied from a template file, it could be created at boot time from the contents of backup.tar.gz. I'm not sure if this is a difficult task, but I think it would prevent unexpectedly overwriting and losing your original archive.
If this is not an easy task, perhaps make the initial filetool.lst an EMPTY file. If a person needs to manually edit the file in order to do any significant backup, I don't see why there needs to be anything in it to begin with....I thought I understood the backup process better than I did, and ended up wasting a good part of my coffee-drinking time.

So...just some thoughts there. In summary:
If you have a backup partition...
1) and want to boot without it, make sure you use the 'norestore' boot option (thanks ke4nt for schooling me on that).
2) be sure to check filetool.lst before reboot/shutdown...either delete it or make sure all appropriate files are included.

Thank you for your time, and have a pleasant winter.

Posted by roberts on Dec. 20 2004,16:55

autorestore and the "norestore" boot time option has been in since 0.8.3. From the < notes > section:

New for 0.8.3

1. New control panel GUI
2. New Xvesa video setup GUI
3. New smbclient GUI
4. Improved mydsl GUI now groups applications according to category.
5. New autorestore of backup files, with boot time "norestore" override
6. Updated prism2 to support autodetected usb ethernet card
7. Updated mc colors when issued from cli
8. Added mkdosswapfile script
9. fixed restart window manager - bbpager

Posted by mikshaw on Dec. 20 2004,17:43

I usually don't download files much larger than a few megabytes on my dialup, so I skipped from 0.8.0 to 0.9.0 =o)
Anyway, it's all sorted now....I just delete filetool.lst when I don't want the auto-backup.
Thanks for making DSL even easier.