Bug 185042

All current enhancements should be changed to -> LATER
I'll reopen them after the time comes.

Reopening (small feature)

- Do not add the suffix .tar to a backup destination if the file is
  a block device or lies under the /dev/ path (#185042).
- yast2-backup-2.13.3

Unfortunately this doesn't work. Now the backup stops with the message: directoy /dev full. Probably when saving the xml-file. Instead of trying to save the xml-file into filesystem, the backup should tar it out to the same device-file.

Actually, this is a different bug than has been reported.

Anyway, please, attach YaST logs (/var/log/YaST2/) to this bug.

Created attachment 112047 [details]
Yast Logs

Created attachment 112104 [details]
y2log

I produced the error once again, so you will find the error condition at the end of the log-file.

I see (even if there is nothing in the log file, I'm afraid), backup is saved to /dev/nst0 but the autoprofile (system-configuration export) tries to save the current configuration into /dev/nst0.xml (or something similar).

1.) Unfortunately, it is not possible to include that XML file into a regular archive (because, for instance, that XML file contains names of archives)
2.) This file can be appended to the tape only if it is not rewindable (/dev/nst0 vs. /dev/st0)

To be honest, I'm not sure about the correct solution of this issue right now. It would be possible to create and save the autoprofile (append) to a non-rewindable tape and to, let say, ~/.yast-backup/ directory if the tape is rewindable. Or just save it there always when backup destination is under the /dev/ directory...

Also maybe the autoprofile (but without names of archives) could be created before the real backup starts and included in the first backup but this would cost a lot of development effort.

What do you think of that? Do you have any better idea?

For me it would be ok, if the XML file always is saved in a directory, say ~/.yast-backup. But I don't know, how the recovery process works, if you have to restore the whole backup in case if you lose all your data. I don't know if the recovery needs the XML file, or if it can work without. What you can do e.g. is to save the XML file to ~/.yast-backup and the rest to the tape device, and then tell the user to backup the XML-files separately. For the recovery the user would restore the XML-files first and then with the recovery tool he could chose which back to restore and the recovery tool will restore from the tape.

- When creating backup on tape (e.g., /dev/nst0), backup profile
  is also appended to that location (#185042 from comment #4).
- yast2-backup2.15.1

Non-rewindable tapes are not supported, that's why we can append the profile to the tape after the archive is created there.

Nevertheless, neither that archive nor that profile will work in automatic restore (yast2-restore). Restore expects '.tar' of another .tar or .star archives or directories (by package-name) but the archive is already in .tar format on the tape. If you copy the archive somewhere (by tar, of course), the archive will be already extracted. Tapes were never expected to work well :) Thanks God, backup works and extraction from tape as well :)

Example of extraction:

`mt -f /dev/nst0 rewind`

`tar -xvf /dev/nst0`
info/files
info/packages_info.gz
info/hostname
info/date
info/comment
info/installed_packages
aaa_base-10.2-38-20070112-0.tar.gz
evms-2.5.5-67-20070112-0.tar.gz
fontconfig-2.4.1-19-20070112-0.tar.gz
pam-0.99.6.3-24-20070112-0.tar.gz
postfix-2.3.2-28-20070112-0.tar.gz
qt3-3.3.7-12-20070112-0.tar.gz
sane-1.0.18-34-20070112-0.tar.gz
sysconfig-0.60.4-3-20070112-0.tar.gz
tightvnc-1.2.9-224-20070112-0.tar.gz
NOPACKAGE-20070112-0.tar.gz

`tar -xvf /dev/nst0` (dividing block)

`tar -xvf /dev/nst0`
backup-profile.xml

Ok, thats good for me :-) Also for use with yast2-restore, one could copy the tar-archive to the filesystem with dd and edit the xml-file manually.

Thx