Notices

Sorry Karam, I've missed your question about ext4. As I don't want to hijack this productive thread, I'll just drop link for consideration:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Changing_the_eMMC_filesystem

Near end of this article, some benchmarks are shown. I would also mention more reliable journal implementation, and all fixes/upgrades, that one can found by watching ext3/ext4 changelog Long story short, it works great on N900 with kernel-power, stock kernel doesn't have modules for ext4 AFAIK.

i hav installed backup menu. i want to flash n900. so do i backup rootfs or only programs and settings? i oredy backdup what showd recommend there. but will it help if i flash my device and restore it. it will be the same thing.ryt? and by the way i am flashing because my cell is slow. and how to restore thebackup when i flash it

here is my issue guys
hope somebody can help ---->

my optfs backup usually goes to 16 GB
cause i have repartitioned my N900

so :
i need MyDocs to be
NTFS or ext3/ext4

but : NTFS : N900 didn't read it as well as backupmenu (for restoring backup)

ext3/ext4 : N900 read it but backupmenu didn't (for restoring backup)

that's why i'm having issues with backupmenu
when ever the backup reaches 4gb while backing up backupmenu stops working with exit code 1
cause the filesystem of MyDocs is fat32 which doesn't accept more than 4 gb file

As I've discussed this with Karam before, I would add my 2 cents. Because his problem is with creating backups of optFS bigger than 4GB (vFAT doesn't accept files larger than 4GB, backupmenu doesn't provide mechanism for splitting tar's into 2 files for backuping/restoring), I think this may be workaround'ed by modifying backupmenu scripts to backup *to* partition formatted as ext3/ext4 (I would drop ntfs here).

Common sense tells me, that this may be achieved just like backuping *from* ext4 partition - by modifying backupmenu scripts. i'll look at this after returning from trip (I'll be back on sunday evening), but, maybe in meantime, more knowledgeable people (ivyking, I'm looking at You ) are able to help?

anyone plz help me to understand.i am planning to flash my N900. this is very important for me to know and understand sorry if i am bothering you guys

Read the guide on the first post.
In order to restore it, you'll have to install BM again, on your new install, and then restore your backup through it.

-------
In other news, calamity has happened: My main drive/raid - 1.2TB of data, some hard to replace, some irriplacable -- which(of course) I didn't back up - has somehow managed to get screwed up.
It looks like some wayward program just "rm -rf"'d it: All of the data appears to be on disk, but no names, metadata, folders etc.
And I had the misfortune to use ext4. F my life.
You can read the complete story here: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.p...390305#p390305

In short, it's gonna be a while. I have my old drives with data up to around July 2010(I hope), but that's still a year of work that needs recovery. It's... gonna be a while.

Oh, and from now on I'm going to:
1. do weekly backups to a server I'll keep
2. Have a small, encrypted drive rhat I'll keep important daa in and sync to a Spider Oak account.
3. Probably use btrfs with hourly/weekly snapshots for my new setup, so I can always restore deleted files.

sorry for very late reply,

as for backing up to an ext4/ext3 partition that's fairly easy to do and involves minimal additions, will try to do it as soon as I have some extra time. (should be soon)

as for splitting the tar ball, that can be done after it is created, which means it's not feasible since it can't be created in the first place if it's size goes over 4GB.

as a work around, we can create a tar ball, and scan rootfs directories, getting list of files, and append the files one by one to the tar ball, after each file is added we check the size of the tar ball, and the size of the next file to be added, if the size of the tar ball and the next file exceed 4GB, we create a new tar ball, adding that file to it and so on..

before applying the 4GB limit backupmenu should check the target partition type, maybe it isn't vFat so there is no need for this.

the restoration mechanism will have to be slightly altered, currently backupmenu clears the partition before restoration, for restoring multiple tar balls, the partition should be cleared once only once in the beginning then the tarballs should be extracted one after the other, maybe make a new menu item for restoration from multiple files, the user has to select the tarballs that are to be restored together.

It can be done on the fly using the -M, -L & -F switches. You'll need to write a script to rename the separate files (it creates every file with the same name, then calls the script before starting the next one). I've not looked into restoration, but I'd assume that the same process in reverse would work fine.

I installed backupmenu and get this with reboot with keyboard open:

UDev started
1
2
Error with: cp /lib/libac1.so.1 /tmp/disk/lib Code: 1
op: can't stat '/lib/libac1.so.1'" No such file or directory
Press any key to continue...
Error with: cp /lib/libattr.so.1.1.10 /tmp/disk/lib/ Code: 1
cp: can't stat '/lib/libattr.so.1.1.0': no such file or directory
Press any key to continue...
3.
4.
Modules starting

And then the menu loads

Is there an issue here I need to fix?

no there isn't,

you can also get rid of there by removing the lines with the names of these files from the file called "filelist.txt" which is inside the extrafile.tar.gz archive that is located in /usr/share/backupmenu/

alternatively, you can comment the line the calls the function pressanykey inside the loop that copies files, you can find it in BackupmenuLauncher.item