Redo Backup and Recovery

[ewemoa]

Been trying out Redo Backup and Recovery to backup and restore a system partition for Windows XP.  (Mentioned earlier by ha14.)

Sample set up:

0. Prepare a minimal updated Windows XP (mine may have been somewhere in the neighborhood of 7GB).
1. Download and burn the Redo live cd.
2. After booting from the live cd passed the initial menu, choose the menu item to install to USB device (8GB was more than enough) and follow the screens...

Sample backup usage:

1. Boot from the USB device (here, this was much faster than via optical media).
2. Choose backup and follow the screens -- choose to save the Windows XP partition to the USB device.
3. Wait a bit (less than 10 minutes here).

Sample restore usage:

1. Boot from the USB device.
2. Choose restore and follow the screens -- choose to restore the image from the USB device.
3. Wait a bit (less than for backing up here).

Recommend testing with VirtualBox first.  FWIW, the following was a nice tip for getting VirtualBox to boot from USB:

  Boot a USB Flash Drive in VirtualBox @ pendrivelinux.com

The live cd comes with a few useful apps including gparted, palimpsest (aka Disk Utility), TestDisk, a disk wiper, and Chromium.

Redo appears to be a wrapper around partclone which IIUC is used by Clonezilla (also nice but more complicated to figure out IMHO).

Update: Found a tutorial for an older version (0.9.5?): http://www.oakdome.c...e-with-usb-drive.php -- fwiw, the version I used (1.0.1) looks different (especially what shows up after the initial boot menu), but the general flow seems similar enough.

multi usb note

Had some difficulty using the live cd iso from YUMI or Sardu (may have been both) so went with a dedicated USB device.

[ewemoa]

Succeeded in placing redo 1.0.1 on an internal hard drive, leveraging grub4dos.  This is documented at:

  https://sourceforge....169663/topic/4568603

[ewemoa]

Have restored a number of times for various reasons and it appears to work well here.  Once booted into Redo, the actual restore takes a little over 3 minutes (though shutting down takes more than a few seconds).  The partition being restored is about 12GB and it is about half full -- though the actual restore image files total to a little under 3GB.

[ewemoa]

Cobbled together a PDF version (with table of contents) of the perl script that is a wrapper around partclone (and a few other tools).

[ewemoa]

1.0.2 seems to have been released a bit back:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Version 1.0.2 (2012-01-03)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Updated to latest partclone stable binaries
* Shorten dropdown menus with an ellipsis after certain character limit
* Ubuntu Maverick repos for updates and backports added; base upgraded
* Chromium browser launched with user data dir specified (to run as root)
* Show time elapsed when backup/restore operations are completed
* Added boot-repair tool for correcting any boot issues after restore
* Added wget utility for easily downloading files from the command line
* Show free space on destination drive while saving a backup
* Warn if less than 1GB free on backup destination drive
* Show an error if any of the partitions to restore do not exist
* Allow spaces in network shared folders

from:

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/redobackup/files/

Unfortunately, haven't gotten it to boot successfully here yet

Update: Seems ok -- problem appeared to be resolved after plugging USB optical drive into a different USB port.

[mouser]

Thanks for posting this ewemoa 

[ewemoa]

Tried 1.0.3 and 1.0.4 today.

1.0.3 worked pretty well, however...

1.0.4. would not restore a backup made with 1.0.3.  1.0.4 also failed to backup the same set up.  Of course, these things may be particular to the local setup.

It appears that along with the backups being made, it might be prudent to backup the iso image of Redo Backup used to create the backup (or note the version used).

Also from 1.0.3:

Restore now overwrites MBR and partition table upon completion

and this appears to be something one cannot opt out of.

Despite these gotchas, 1.0.3 appears to be a viable alternative here to using OneKey Recovery Factor Default Recovery discs.  Redo Backup probably took less than 30 minutes to perform a recovery while the OneKey discs took over an hour.  Also, with Redo Backup it is not necessary to swap among 4 optical discs during the restore.


Changelogs:

Version 1.0.3 (2012-05-10)

* Restore now overwrites MBR and partition table upon completion

Version 1.0.4 (2012-11-20)

* Base upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise)
* Percent complete now based on part sizes rather than total number of parts
* Windows now have titlebars to ease minimizing, maximizing and closing
* Time is now synced to localtime (hardware clock) after boot
* Widget theme changed to Bluebird for Gtk3 compatibility
* Now has a helpful beep to indicate when long processes are finished
* Added alsamixergui to enable mixer button on volume control
* Drive reset utility can now operate on multiple drives simultaneously
* Removed synaptic and boot-repair packages to reduce image size

[majoMO]

Also from 1.0.3:

Restore now overwrites MBR and partition table upon completion

-ewemoa (April 30, 2013, 01:56 AM)

Hi ewemoa, what that really means? I thought that when Redo restored a image it restored also MBR [useful if MBR was changed by some rootkit meanwhile].

[ewemoa]

If I understand correctly, before version 1.0.3 (so 1.0.2 and earlier), the MBR was not restored.

May be the following thread has some relevant discussion:

  MBR restore to be optional

[majoMO]

@ ewemoa, thanks a lot for the thread link! It clarify the issue.

Like said there "Previous versions of Redo did not write the MBR after a restore"; in fact it "completely overwrite your MBR and partition table using data from the backup image" and "ALWAYS written to the drive at the beginning of a restore".

So the MBR is always restored even with olders versions; no problems indeed.

Thanks again!

[ewemoa]

Hmm...looking closely at the thread content, I'm not sure the issue is so clear:

Finally, something that must be mentioned: As far as we know, the MBR and partition table are (currently) ALWAYS written to the drive at the beginning of a restore, without asking. Previous versions of Redo did not write the MBR after a restore, until lately. (This was done because some users reported being unable to boot after a restore, and it appears to have corrected that issue.) So be careful using Redo under the assumption that an older version won't completely overwrite your MBR and partition table using data from the backup image, because it probably is. (If it doesn't, it is more likely a "bug" than a "feature"!)

I got the impression that the developer(s)? are not confident about the matter...

At any rate, IIUC, at least in some versions the relevant code lives in the subroutine named do_restore.  In one version, some of the relevant bits appear to be:

Code: Perl [Select]

1. print "*** Writing MBR to $dest_drive\n";
2.   set_status("Writing master boot record to destination drive...");
3.   system("dd of=/dev/$dest_drive if=$src_mbr bs=32768 count=1; sync;");
4.   sleep(0.5);  
5.   print "*** Restoring partition table to $dest_drive\n";
6.   set_status("Writing extended partition table to destination drive...");
7.   system("sfdisk -fx /dev/$dest_drive < $src_sfdisk; sync");
8.   sleep(0.5);
9.   print "*** Reloading partition table from $dest_drive\n";
10.   set_status("Reloading new partition table from destination drive...");
11.   system("umount /mnt/$dest_drive?* 2>&1");
12.   system("sfdisk -R /dev/$dest_drive");
13.   sleep(1);

BTW, I have extracted one of the versions of Redo from a live CD image and experimentally made an Arch-based live cd that runs Redo.  I tried this because it seems a lot easier to customize and tinker with Arch-based live cds as compared with the Ubuntu-based ones.  If there is interest in this, I might write up some relevant instructions.