[Gb-ccb] Backup of the CCB microdrive

[John Ford]

Martin Shepherd writes:
 > I gather that the top of the CCB is currently off. Before the lid is
 > put back on again, it would be great if somebody could remove the CCB
 > microdrive for an hour or so, and back it up to a disk somewhere. If you
 > are too busy, then I'll see if I can do some kind of backup over the
 > net, although doing that on an active filesystem is always dicey.

We can also boot it to CDROM and copy it off with it mounted
read-only.  This is a good way to do it when the top is not off!
We'll go through the following procedure next week and try it out.

John

 > 
 > The following notes are based on my experience of backing up the
 > microdrive in Pasadena.
 > 
 > 1. Preparation:
 > 
 >     Before going going to the trouble of removing the microdrive, I
 >     suggest that you get the flash-card reader installed on a linux
 >     machine, and find a place to temporarily store the 2GB image-file
 >     that will come from the microdrive. Since the latter file should
 >     compress down to around 600MB, you will subsequently need a
 >     permanent place for a 600MB file.
 > 
 >     I left the flash-card reader that I previously used for microdrive
 >     backups, with Brian. I suggest that you use this, since it is known
 >     to work with the microdrive. When I was using this, I was
 >     pleasantly surprised to find that when the microdrive was plugged
 >     into this flash-card reader, I could run fdisk, install boot
 >     loaders, and apply other hard-disk utilities to the microdrive, as
 >     though it were an IDE disk. That may or may not be a common feature
 >     of all flash-card readers, but I do know that this one works.
 > 
 >     If the distribution of Linux that you are using doesn't
 >     automatically associate a mount-point with the flash-card reader,
 >     when you plug it in to the USB port and insert a flash-card or the
 >     microdrive, then get a sysadmin to edit /etc/updfstab.conf, find
 >     the clause that starts with the line:
 > 
 >       device flash {
 > 
 >     and add a line that says:
 > 
 >           match   hd STORAGE\ DEVICE
 > 
 >     Thereafter (provided that the flash-card reader has been plugged in
 >     to the USB port), whenever you insert a flash-card or microdrive,
 >     you should see a mount-point called, /mnt/flash. To mount this, you
 >     would then type:
 > 
 >       mount /mnt/flash
 > 
 >     However for the backup don't mount it, since its contents need to
 >     be treated as a single large stable file, rather than an active
 >     filesystem.
 > 
 > 2. Now extract the microdrive from the CCB, after shutting it down and
 >     turning off the power. The microdrive is difficult to get at
 >     without removing the GPIO card, so Randy, JD, or Jason should do
 >     this.
 > 
 > 3. Insert the microdrive in the flash-card reader, and check that a
 >     mount-point (probably /mnt/flash) shows up in the /mnt/ directory.
 > 
 > 4. Now look in /etc/fstab for a line that refers to the above
 >     mount-point, and write down the name of the device-file that
 >     appears in the first column of that line. On my computer this was
 >     /dev/sda1. This is actually the name of the first partition on the
 >     disk, whereas we want to address the whole device. Therefore when
 >     backing up this device I backed up /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1.
 > 
 > 5. If you mounted the microdrive, unmount it now. Then go to a
 >     directory that has space for the 2GB microdrive-image and, assuming
 >     that the device above was /dev/sda (replace this name with the
 >     actual device name if not), type:
 > 
 >      dd if=/dev/sda of=ccb_microdrive_image
 > 
 >     This will take some time.
 > 
 > 6. Once the dd finishes, remove the microdrive, and place it back in
 >     the CCB.
 > 
 > 7. If you have time, you could now remove the 2nd microdrive from the
 >     spare CCB computer (last seen in the lab, by the monitor), insert
 >     it into the flash-card reader, and copy the above image file onto
 >     it, by typing:
 > 
 >      dd if=ccb_microdrive_image of=/dev/sda
 > 
 >     Then restore the microdrive to the spare CCB computer. This would
 >     give us a live backup.
 > 
 > 8. Regardless of whether you do the above step, compress the image
 >     file with gzip, and move the result to a more permanent location.
 > 
 >      gzip ccb_microdrive_image
 >      cp ccb_microdrive_image.gz /wherever/CCB/archive_dir/
 > 
 > Thanks,
 > 
 > Martin
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