OMV Updates available through Update Manager - safe to do so?

switched · 8. September 2015

Hi All,

I have a number of updates available to OMV 2.1 and whilst I have everything working it is nice.
I am cautious about applying updates via the update manager incase it does break something.

There are plenty of updates there, ranging from basefiles, libbind, openmediavault2.1.3, php* etc all in all probably around about 30 updates ready to go.

Whats the best approach here. I do backups via clonezilla but I've never actually had to test the restore of the backup so I dont want to break it and learn the hard way.

Thoughts and ideas from more senior linux members?

ryecoaaron · 8. September 2015

I just installed them all on four systems...

Test restoring a clonezilla backup in a virtual machine.

switched · 8. September 2015

My problem is my OS drive is 256GB So I need to have this available for a test restore.
Has there been reports of restoring a backup failing or is it pretty seamless?

switched · 8. September 2015

another quick question - are clonezilla backups generally viewable in Windows OS? I have three USB drives, and only one is recognised by windows?

ryecoaaron · 8. September 2015

When using Clonezilla, the drive size is fairly irrelevant. The backup will be much smaller than the size of the drive unless it is relatively full.

When I meant test the restore in a VM, I meant create a new VM with a fresh install of OMV. Clone it with Clonezilla and then restore it.

Most of the updates are Debian Wheezy updates. Debian is a very stable OS. Do you install Windows updates? There is probably the same chance of failure.

Viewable in windows? Depends on how and what you backup to. If you backup to a samba share, you can see the compressed Clonezilla files. Not sure what you are looking for here.

switched · 8. September 2015

Thanks Ryan,...
remember the issue I had earlier with the clonezilla.. in OMV1 for some reason the VM wasn't booting clonezilla through virtualbox.. it was part loading and then freezing so I could never test the restore. I was running both physical and virtual OMV at OMV1 when doing this testing.
I've since rebuilt a test VM on OMV2.0 and that is loading clonezilla OK so I've used gparted tonight to increase the size temporarily on the VM drive to test that the restore works. If I know its good, I can restore this to my physical box at any time in the future. I've gotten it to restore to my test VM, but I'll have to test it tomorrrow as its getting too late.

gderf · 8. September 2015

I make nightly backup images of my entire OMV system drive using dd via cron, and also rotate those backups keeping only the most recent three. The backups are scheduled to take place when the system is not in use by humans, and I don't care if some log files might change during the backup. I have verified that these backup images do actually restore to media that boots and behaves as it should.

It's pointless to undertake any backup strategy, regardless of its origin, if you don't verify that the backups can actually be successfully restored and operate as intended.

ryecoaaron · 8. September 2015

Using dd on a live system may work sometimes but I wouldn't rely on it especially if using any kind of database. rsync like the openmediavault-backup plugin uses is safer. It keeps a backup of the mbr using dd and can be scheduled with omv-mkconf backup backup

gderf · 8. September 2015

Unfortunately, your suggestion appears to follow aufs mountpoints I have that contain numerous terabytes of data in addition to the OS.

ryecoaaron · 9. September 2015

Zitat von gderf

Unfortunately, your suggestion appears to follow aufs mountpoints I have that contain numerous terabytes of data in addition to the OS.

Hard to exclude custom mountpoints... It excludes the following directories:
/dev, /proc, /sys, /tmp, /run, /mnt, /media, /lost+found, /export, /home/ftp, /srv/ftp, /srv/tftp

gderf · 9. September 2015

I see those exclusions listed in /usr/share/openmediavault/mkconf/backup

If I edit that file to add to the exclusions will those changes stick? Or is that file generated and a change made somewhere else would be permanent?

ryecoaaron · 9. September 2015

They will stick until the plugin is upgraded. Are you putting custom mountpoints in /?

gderf · 9. September 2015

I have a few data folders aufs mounted to /home/sftp/ which is a chroot for the sftp server. The reason it's on the rootfs is that I need logging within the chroot and I could never get that working when it was off the rootfs.

I guess I could go thru the trouble to change that setup to use /home/ftp instead which is excluded.

When this backup plugin is run, does it do versioning and consolidation or is only one version kept and overwritten. How can it be scheduled?

ryecoaaron · 9. September 2015

I can add /home/ftp to the exclusions.

The plugin just uses rsync. No versioning. Schedule in Scheduled Tasks with the following command (as root): omv-mkconf backup backup

gderf · 9. September 2015

Maybe I will copy the script and edit to suit my needs and run that on cron. Thanks for your time.

tekkb · 10. September 2015

Making backups with Clonezilla is pretty easy with the backup plugin. Yeah, it is manual but at least you can do it headless via ssh. With the restore you can't do it via the sysmtem drive obviously when you restore the image. So you have have a usb stick of Clonezilla or a CD/DVD drive connected and have disk with an ISO of Clonezilla burnt to it. You boot via the cd or usb stick and can login via SSH to restore the system disk. Your image should be in a folder on the root of one of the data drives. You mount that image from the folder, you also mount the system drive, and use it to restore to the system drive. This can be accomplished all via ssh. It is good idea to have your OMV setup with a static lease in your router. This way when you are booting to repair disks or Clonezilla your OMV is always assigned the same ip address. The when you need to ssh into a repair disk or Clonezilla you always know your ip address for your OMV.

Once you get your OMV setup the way you like it you will not be making changes as often. I maybe backup my bare metal machine once a month.

I am using vms way more than my production server for testing, etc....

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