[Sugar-devel] backups

[Tabitha Roder]

On 12/08/2010, S Page <skierpage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Interesting!  I think Journal backup to the school server has been a
> feature since XS 0.4 and Release 8.2, see
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Blueprints:Datastore_Simple_Backup_and_Restore
> , and that's what your picture shows.  I assume you're referring to
> the recent Sugar work (I think
> <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2010-June/025094.html>
> that has added backup to locally-attached volumes.

We just upgraded half the Samoan deployment using this feature to
restore their work. They were on 8.2.0 (build 767) so I wrote a backup
script which simply makes a tar file on the usb:

#! /bin/sh

SERIAL=`cat /ofw/serial-number`
BACKUP=`dirname "$0"`/backup

mkdir -p "$BACKUP/$SERIAL"
cd /home/olpc/.sugar/default
tar -czf "$BACKUP/$SERIAL/datastore.tar.gz" datastore
echo backed up journal to $BACKUP/$SERIAL/datastore.tar.gz

Put that file on a usb stick, insert into the XO and run the script
(when doing a mass upgrade, ctrl-alt-neighbourhood gets to a terminal
quickly). The tar file on the usb contains the whole journal. The
dextrose restore will load it, but there is a bug if you are coming
from early builds, see http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/2149 and an
additional bug which I haven't reported yet (migration fails if an
entry in in the source journal doesn't have a preview). Migration
isn't perfect, but record photos and write documents survive fine.

If you want to restore to a different xo, change the serial number of
the tar file. You should be able to restore manually if your
destination build doesn't have a restore feature, just replace the
datastore directory with the one in the backup and ctrl-alt-erase
restart (I'm not sure how safe this is, the running system may try to
write to the "old" journal during the shutdown, migration happens on
startup).

Tom