VSIDO Installation Guide for fsarchive version

[jedi]

So, after many installs using this latest .fsa method (METHOD to be clear, not the currently available download) I daresay it's about perfect!  I'd have saved myself a lot of grief had I simply read the very beginning of PackRat's post "...tioned drive. Legacy BIOS system"

That said, I've given some effort on the UEFI only way, but to no avail.  So far the only successful way for me has been by installing another distro first (Official Debian Sid/bookworm) in order to get the UEFI signed bios key that comes with that particular distro's installer.  I'm aware of other distros having a signing key as well for UEFI I just haven't looked that deep.  My 3 reasons work for me...

#1. It's to easy to do using the 3 available methods! 

#2. There is so much disk space available these days that another distro I hardly see in order to have a UEFI system is worth it.  A pain to have to update-grub twice but hey small price.  Part of the 'worth' being 3 or 4 second boot times! 

#3. There are still a tremendous amount of things about Linux I don't know or understand.  It works.  I don't have to know or understand.  When incredible people like VastOne and PackRat continue to watch over our community/forum and GIVE us their wisdom/knowledge for nothing in return I'm awed.  Thanks to both of you for saving my mind and ALWAYS being there for Linux...

[VastOne]

#2. There is so much disk space available these days that another distro I hardly see in order to have a UEFI system is worth it.  A pain to have to update-grub twice but hey small price.  Part of the 'worth' being 3 or 4 second boot times! 

Hey Jedi.. Excellent feedback and thank you for all the efforts in testing these      Also thank you for the kind words..

Once you have it installed, from your vsido installation you should be able to then just run the following and only have to worry about one grub to update if the vsido install is all you care about

Code Select Expand

sudo grub-install /dev/sda

[VastOne]

Hey RatMan.. I am parking this here because it makes sense since there is so much How To discussion on using fsarchiver.. In using btrfs exclusively I ran into an issue where I could not get fsarchiver to restore my main root partition that I do all my work on. Since I use nVidia, occasionally I get a broken system due to a nVidia upgrade where I need to wait a day or more for nVidia to fix and release the code.. So I keep a near weekly backup of my current system and restore it to a secondary disk on the same machine.. In all my work with ext4, it never had any issues with uuid's, in fact it gives no shits about how you want to restore to, btrfs on the other hand does. Fsarchiver will not restore a btrfs file system to the machine if it detects the same uuid already on that machine, it spits out an error and life goes on.

Still have the issue though and needed a solution other than creating snapshots (story for another day) and began a search that led me straight to the fsarchiver manpages and a solution which made fsarchiver that much more an incredible tool IMO.. there is a uuid option to change the uuid on the restore! Below is the fsarchive command to generate it and also a cool site that generates random uuid's

Get a random uuid here: Random UUID (v4) generator

Code Select Expand

sudo fsarchiver -v restfs vsido_btrfs_23DEC2023.fsa id=0,dest=/dev/sdXX,uuid=ea33a312-71f8-4172-b3c9-027ca7f4264a
The uuid in that example is one I pulled for that site DO NOT USE IT, get your own!

[PackRat]

Nice find.

[VastOne]

Nice find.

Thanks, I would put fsarchiver up there with any of the greatest foss apps ever catagory

[DeepDayze]

Thanks for this and wasn't aware of this new way to install VSIDO. Would been cool if there was a way to set this up on a UEFI system perhaps with a script to run to then mount the EFI partition after the fsarchive has been successfully restored and then install the grub EFI packages and set it up to boot.

[VastOne]

Thanks for this and wasn't aware of this new way to install VSIDO. Would been cool if there was a way to set this up on a UEFI system perhaps with a script to run to then mount the EFI partition after the fsarchive has been successfully restored and then install the grub EFI packages and set it up to boot.

Hey Dayze, good to see you.. I believe PackRat and Jedi have talked about that and possibly have come up with a solution.

In your scenario does the UEFI system already have grub on it? If the answer is yes then wouldn't a update-grub on that system then find the VSIDO install and then you could manipulate grub from there whatever way you wanted to, right?

[DeepDayze]

Thanks for this and wasn't aware of this new way to install VSIDO. Would been cool if there was a way to set this up on a UEFI system perhaps with a script to run to then mount the EFI partition after the fsarchive has been successfully restored and then install the grub EFI packages and set it up to boot.

Hey Dayze, good to see you.. I believe PackRat and Jedi have talked about that and possibly have come up with a solution.

In your scenario does the UEFI system already have grub on it? If the answer is yes then wouldn't a update-grub on that system then find the VSIDO install and then you could manipulate grub from there whatever way you wanted to, right?

Long time no see, VastOne and hope all's well with you.

In my case I was assuming a fresh new install and setting up the ESP partition, root partition (where I'd restore the FSA to), and another partition for home folders. If I already had the partitions set up and maybe there's a Windows partition, would it just be necessary to add to the fstab the entry for the EFI ESP and mount it to /boot/efi after restoring and then run update-grub?

[DeepDayze]

Hey RatMan.. I am parking this here because it makes sense since there is so much How To discussion on using fsarchiver.. In using btrfs exclusively I ran into an issue where I could not get fsarchiver to restore my main root partition that I do all my work on. Since I use nVidia, occasionally I get a broken system due to a nVidia upgrade where I need to wait a day or more for nVidia to fix and release the code.. So I keep a near weekly backup of my current system and restore it to a secondary disk on the same machine.. In all my work with ext4, it never had any issues with uuid's, in fact it gives no shits about how you want to restore to, btrfs on the other hand does. Fsarchiver will not restore a btrfs file system to the machine if it detects the same uuid already on that machine, it spits out an error and life goes on.

Still have the issue though and needed a solution other than creating snapshots (story for another day) and began a search that led me straight to the fsarchiver manpages and a solution which made fsarchiver that much more an incredible tool IMO.. there is a uuid option to change the uuid on the restore! Below is the fsarchive command to generate it and also a cool site that generates random uuid's

Get a random uuid here: Random UUID (v4) generator

Code Select Expand

sudo fsarchiver -v restfs vsido_btrfs_23DEC2023.fsa id=0,dest=/dev/sdXX,uuid=ea33a312-71f8-4172-b3c9-027ca7f4264a
The uuid in that example is one I pulled for that site DO NOT USE IT, get your own!

Bummer. Fsarchiver as a backup/restore tool for BTRFS then is no bueno. There should be some sort of override so that you can restore a BTRFS .fsa with its original UUID.

[VastOne]

Bummer. Fsarchiver as a backup/restore tool for BTRFS then is no bueno. There should be some sort of override so that you can restore a BTRFS .fsa with its original UUID.

It's really a security feature to make sure that you don't have multiple instances of the same UUID booting.. IMO, the ext4 part should do the same but does now.

You could try this format above using the uuid you want to see if it would work, I never tried to restore with the exact same uuid, it may be possible. I'll test this as well