[Announce] BackupMenu - OS backup & restore | New version - Jul 9th(v1.1)

[richwhite]

Will this backup everything? As in, will it save my custom icons, desktop command codes and widgets, QBW code, angry birds scores, email settings, backgrounds and home screens etc etc?

[hawaii]

It's a complete rootfs and optfs backup.

Yes.

[richwhite]

And it's as simple as reboot with keyboard open, restore backup, and every single thing is back to how it was?

Will this work with 1.3?

[debernardis]

Hello Robbie,
after I backed up with this latest method I rebooted and found my n900 completely messed up. This happened also last time I did it, with your previous version (the tar one). To be clear, I didn't try any reboot.
Now I'm restoring with your first version, the img one, which works for me by flashing the rootfs and restoring the optfs.
Do you have any hint why the simple action of backup in some way damages the filesystem? This sounds me quite strange, but it's what is happening to me.

[RobbieThe1st]

Originally Posted by debernardis

Hello Robbie,
after I backed up with this latest method I rebooted and found my n900 completely messed up. This happened also last time I did it, with your previous version (the tar one). To be clear, I didn't try any reboot.
Now I'm restoring with your first version, the img one, which works for me by flashing the rootfs and restoring the optfs.
Do you have any hint why the simple action of backup in some way damages the filesystem? This sounds me quite strange, but it's what is happening to me.

Thanks for testing. Lets see what went wrong here:

First, a sanity check: Is the outer border of the BackupMenu window -blue- or -orange-? Also, the new one should be v0.45.
My first thought is that /etc/bootmenu.d/BackupMenuLauncher.item was not removed from your test of my earlier alphas, and it "took precedence", potentially resulting in a problem.
Make sure that both BackupMenu and BackupMenuLauncher in /usr/share/backupmenu/ are infact the same version as the ones in the package I released, and that "backupmenu.item"(all lowercase) exists in /etc/bootmenu.d/ and is the only file there.

Second thing to try is installing a framebuffer kernel and watching where it dies on.
Stock: http://mohammadag.xceleo.org/public/...e-fb-omap1.bin
power40: http://mohammadag.xceleo.org/public/...ebuffer-kernel
Flash one of those to your N900 with "flasher-3.5 -k ./zImage..... -f -R", then watch it boots. Note that it slightly interferes with the graphics of BackupMenu, but its -more or less- legible even with it on.

Let me know how things work out - I'm under pressure to get this fixed and out there replacing my old version, due to that one using DD to write directly to the NAND flash of the rootfs, which, I have been told, is dangerous and should never be done. So... Yea.

[debernardis]

Well, it was 0.45, I erased the previous version. And, my device was messed up just after the backup, without ever trying to restore.
As regards the framebuffer kernel, I'll do after making a full backup with your first version, which, although deprecated, is the only one which worked reliably for me, I mean flashing from another machine.

[RobbieThe1st]

Hm, that's weird. By "messed up", do you mean it wouldn't boot, or something else?
Also, would you mind checking if it does it upon install(i.e. conflict with something else), or upon actually making a backup(still not sure how that could happen..)

Thanks again for your help.

[debernardis]

Originally Posted by RobbieThe1st

Hm, that's weird. By "messed up", do you mean it wouldn't boot, or something else?
Also, would you mind checking if it does it upon install(i.e. conflict with something else), or upon actually making a backup(still not sure how that could happen..)

Thanks again for your help.

I renamed the old /etc/bootmenu.d/backupmenu.item.
Then reinstalled the new 0.45 backupmenu, through untarring. No problem. Made a backup of both rootfs and optfs on the sd card. Noticed that the backup of the optfs was much smaller than the img (of course: the img includes the whole 2 gigabytes while the tar includes only the real files).

Then rebooted. When it woke up, it had a banner flashing once in a minute or the so saying the email client wasn't working, apmefo menu disappeared and the apps menu was lacking a great part of its icons.
So at least part of the /home partition was altered. Don't know if rootfs was in a trouble too.

Is it possible that the backup operation leaves the filesystem open and when shutting up it's left in an unconsistent state? But why on the optfs, while the tar file was written on the sd card?

I didn't go deeper in the issue because I needed the device, and went to restore a fortnight old backup made with your first method (img), which *is* reliable in my hands when flashing through another machine.

I don't know. Maybe it was a coincidence, and other peoples' reports can enlighten the issue. But... same thing happened when I tried your previous version, the one with tar, and two coincidences in a row are disturbing.

[RobbieThe1st]

Ok, that's something at least. Let me see...
While it does "sync" and poweroff properly, I didn't add a line to umount the optfs/rootfs after backup.
on the -restore- side, it does have it, though.

I'll add that modification and see if it fixes it.
In the meantime, would you mind trying to restore your previous images? That should work fine. Just backing up might cause a problem.

Edit: Updated version posted in first post as well as: http://robbiethe1st.afraid.org/Backu...0101019.tar.gz

[Tigerite]

Well I gave it a test tonight, albeit only the backup functionality, and all seems to be working. I missed the bit about deleting the original BackupMenu.item within /etc/bootmenu.d as the new version is backupmenu.item (all lower case), and so the one in extras-devel was being launched instead at first. Once I figured that out though then all went swimmingly. The new method is much faster than the old one although my rootfs tar is slightly bigger than the img. Maybe the tar's could be gzipped as well?

I'll test out restoring a bit later, if I am brave enough.. ;-)