[Discuss] Dolly the Sheep

[Patrick]

Okay, finally got that cloning thing together.  A few things got
in my way.

First, dd makes perfect copies; it copies *everything* about a
filesystem from one place to another.  It duplicates things which
really should be unique, like, for example, its UUID...  Turns
out my `Universal Unique Identifiers' were, uh, a little more
universal, and a hell of a lot *less* unique than they should
have been.

Since that's only supposed to happen once every billion years or
so, the system doesn't bother to check for that kind of thing at
startup.

I reset the non-unique UUIDs, rearranged things, messed with
this, reconfigured that...  No change.

I'd changed the entries in my /etc/fstab from UUID=[line noise]
to old-fashioned /dev/sdaN references already, because they're
easier to read, and I'd disabled grub passing UUID information to
the kernel at boot.  Didn't change a thing, kept sending me back
to /dev/sda5 regardless.

So the kernel and/or initrd must use them internally.  I had
noticed while installing and/or updating anything that affected
the kernel, that the package manager would automagically rebuild
initrd to reflect those changes.  Guess some UUID stuff slipped
in there while it was doing that.

Now my fstabs are full of illegible nonsense, grub passes UUIDs
to the kernel[s], and I seem to have a working, bootable backup
OS.  F*c1< it took long enough.  Felt like I was trying to fix a
watch with a hammer.  I guess I was.

Much better to use;
	sudo cp -dPprx [src] [dest]
and copy things at the file level, not the partition level.  I
will use dd to back-up Windows and my /boot partitions [and try
not to get them mixed up...], but that's it.

Now on to rsync , cron , and those snapshots...



Cheers,

Patrick.

PS:  No, I haven't changed my hostname to `d011y'...  Although
     it did cross my mind.
-- 
There is no time like the present for postponing what you ought
to be doing.