Backup before reinstallation

  • Hello everyone,
    First of all I would like to apologize for my English, I am French and do not speak English very well ...


    I have many problems on my OMV, and I think the best solution to solve
    all the problems and to redo a complete installation of the system.
    Before
    doing this installation again, I would like to be able to save settings
    made on my OMV, for example I would like to save all storage and
    management of access rights so as not to have to re-create users and shared files ...


    In services, for appleshare I would like not to lose my timemachine backups.


    The rest is not really important, I have a plex, and qbittorrent running, but I plan to re create in docker.


    Thank you for your answers,

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    Make screenshots to document settings.


    After you have made a reinstall, restore the settings from the screenshots.


    Make sure to backup the rootfs BEFORE you do any changes or updates. If the changes/updates don't work out, restore the rootfs. If the changes/updates work out, update the rootfs backup. Otherwise you will have to reinstall and loose all settings soon again.

  • Or I still have not understood anything ... I perform an installation of OMV completely erasing the disk on which it is installed, it is installed at the root of the hard drive and it is totally dedicated to the system.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    ... it is installed at the root of the hard drive and it is totally dedicated to the system.

    That is the rootfs. Where the OMV and the operating system is.


    You have other filesystems on other drives, but they are all mounted somewhere in the root filesystem. For instance in /srv

  • Forgive me for piggybacking on Micka260's question. I want to make sure I understand this clearly:


    If I need to reinstall OMV, there is no way to save and restore the previous setup? So, will all hard drives, for instance, need to be deleted and re-installed from scratch? Everything saved there will be lost?

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    If you wipe the data drives when you reinstall, or store data in the root filesystem, then yes. The data really will be lost when you reinstall. But you don't have to wipe the data drives. Use them as they are. Then all the data on the data drives remain there, unchanged by the reinstall. I suppose that this is why OMV by default has a separate drive for the root filesystem.


    Please also note that if you consider your data important, you demonstrate that by making sure you keep several good backups of it. And make sure that you know how to restore the backups. Otherwise you obviously only have yourself to blame if any data is lost. Data that is not backed up at least three times is obviously not very important.


    There are NO guarantees that your data is safe from you. If you erase the data it is gone, even if you did it by mistake. Unless you have backups.


    It might be possible to manually extract individual files with settings from a bad OMV install, and reuse them in a new install. Or to fix a bad OMV install without reinstalling. But how do you know what settings are good and what settings are bad or even corrupt and might cause problems? I don't know. So I reinstall or restore a backup.


    The whole point of reinstalling is to make sure everything is fine. And when it is you make sure to backup the working root filesystem. That way you can make sure the settings you save are correct.


    When I reinstall I disconnect the data drives. And only reconnect them when OMV is running fine and has been updated fully. That is to protect the data from mistakes I might do while reinstalling and updating.


    When I first started using OMV I reinstalled many times. But I learned and started to backup the root filesystem. Then if there are ANY problems I can restore the root filesystem and quickly be back to a perfect OMV install again. With all settings correct. And I also backup all my important data. Some of it more than three times. Some only once.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    You might reconsider how you use OMV. It is possible to install OMV to a thumbdrive and run it from there. Then you can backup your rootfs simply by backing up the thumbdrive. Google "image thumbdrive".


    However, if you use OMV for other purposes than a simple NAS, then it may not be a good idea to run OMV from a thumbdrive.


    Then, if you have OMV installed on a HDD or SSD, you can boot from some other media and backup OMV that way. You might use Clonezilla for instance. Or SystemRescue. Or any version of Linux with suitable backup or imaging tools. For instance rsync and dd.


    https://clonezilla.org/
    http://www.system-rescue-cd.org/


    You boot from other media because it can be hard to reliably backup a running Linux root filesystem.


    Google "backup root filesystem" for other techniques and tutorials.


    I myself run several OMV servers from SD-cards. I just use OMV for the NAS functionality. I wrote a couple of scripts to backup and restore the SD-cards. Similar to imaging a USB drive.


    On my Linux computers I dual boot to two separate Linux systems. One main and one small I only use to backup the main system, using only rsync. I store the rootfs backups on my OMV NAS servers.

  • Thanks, I understand what to do now--though I am not much of a Linux person. I know how to use Clonezilla; but for much more than that, I have always used Windows software.


    I load OMV from an older small IDE HDD drive. But I could back up the whole thing onto a flash drive. That may seem backwards, but it is probably more reliable for me. I use the SATA ports for the data drives. ...Just so long as the clone software can recognize the USB on this motherboard. I've also used Paragon Drive software and a few others.


    ...Seems to me micka260 can benefit from this approach as well.

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