[SOLVED] Is It Pointless to Image an Arch Machine?

Question

When I got my new laptop, I set up Arch on it, installed all my favorite programs, set up the menus, and made sure everything worked perfectly. Then, I grabbed a Clonezilla LiveCD and took an image of it, just in case something were to happen to the hard drive and I was in a situation where I would need to reinstall Arch. But that got me thinking, is that even a good idea?
The benefit is that if my hard drive breaks, I just need to restore the Clonezilla image, and I'm back in business. However, I'm wondering if a lot of time passes between the creation date of the image and the date of failure, that when I do a pacman -Syu to get up to date, would so much change that it would just break the whole install?
In my career I've always created restore images of all my computers, but I'm wondering with Arch if that is even the most practical way of doing it. What are your thoughts?
Last edited by jlacroix (2010-10-13 19:35:37)

Answer 1

This is what I do...
I personally prefer to have everything backed up, and not just the files that regularelly change, and then I also never have to reinstall, allthough aif makes it fully automatic, so no biggie.
Then there's a couple of solutions to choose from.
I don't like dd'ing, as the empty space read is redundant.
Tar'ing up my system partition and home folder + dd'ing the mbr(grub) is a solution, but it's just much more effecient to do that block-wise as opposed to file-wise, so I prefer using an imaging solution instead.
I then decided to use partclone(supports ext4 with "used blocks only"), and then instead of making my own livecd with partclone, then I just took the pre-built clonezilla one, which also have a console-frontend to partclone and dd etc. and made some changes to make it backup or restore fully automatic, and also set it up to additionally tar/untar my home folder after the backup/restore of the system partition is done and before rebooting, and then I write the modified clonezilla iso to a usb stick(after having run isohybrid on it first to make it usb-bootable).
Then I make a backup(i.e. partclone image of system partition + tar of homefolder) of a fresh install and then after having run my post-install script which sets everything up I again make another backup, which I can revert to whenever wanting a fully clean and newly configured system, and then if wanting to change the use of some apps or settings, then I image back to the base backup and run the modified post-install script and make a new second backup.
About your other question, then it's okay to copy files over, but I personally just issue sed or echo commands from the post-install script.
Last edited by mhertz (2010-10-13 10:25:50)