[Gllug] couple of quick questions (USB stick and backups)

[salsaman]

Nix wrote:

>On Thu, 23 Mar 2006, Richard Jones suggested tentatively:
>  
>
>>On Fri, Mar 24, 2006 at 12:49:28AM +0100, salsaman wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Will tar work on a running system ? Last time I tried this, it got stuck 
>>>in a loop in the /proc filesystem, because /proc/<pid>/root is a symlink 
>>>to the root filesystem. Backing up /dev is probably also not I good idea 
>>>I suppose...
>>>      
>>>
>>It's probably not a good idea to back up the system itself -- after
>>all, Linux ISOs can be downloaded from everywhere, quickly, for free,
>>whereas your own data is rather more precious.  Concentrate on backing
>>up your own data, eg. /home, /etc, possibly /usr/local/, and any other
>>places you use.
>>    
>>
>
>It's certainly never a good idea to back up /proc. It's entirely
>virtual, after all: among other things /proc/kcore is a monster.
>
>(Obviously you don't want to chase symlinks when running backups!)
>
>
>The list of excluded filesystem types in my backup script runs
>
>( 'proc', 'sysfs', 'msdos', 'devpts', 'tmpfs', 'openpromfs', 'iso9660',
>  'udf', 'usbdevfs', 'minix', 'vfat', 'nfs', 'none' );
>
>... but these are merely the virtual filesystems I happen to use. Others
>certainly exist (debugfs, for instance).
>
>  
>

That's OK. I found the "dump" command. First you edit /etc/fstab, and in 
the fifth field you set either a 1 (dump) or 0 (no dump).
Then dump will exclude the filesystems marked with a 0.

As for my USB pen issue, I found out it is due to my using a 64 bit 
version of Mandriva, which has some USB/hotplug "issues". After talking 
to mandriva support, I learned that surprisingly, it doesn't give any 
advantage installing a 64 bit version of Linux unless you are using > 
4GB of memory for a process. So I will be reinstalling that system with 
a 32 bit OS.

Regards,
Gabriel.

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