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Manual backup and restore

Revision as of 23:38, 24 November 2009

Manual Backup And Restore

Imagine you've hacked around your tablet so much you want to back it up, wipe it clean and restore, rather than use the standard system backup/restore which could revert the problems too!

The best strategy is to back up the entire tablet, excluding only things you definitely don't need rather than try and cherry pick things, and then restore specific files and directories.

Backing up the entire tablet

The best program to use is "rsync" - this program is in the maemo extras repository. A suitable backup script is shown below, save it to /usr/local/bin/backup as a plain text file. You can then "chmod ugo+x /usr/local/bin/backup" and run it (as root please). Change "mypc.example.com" to the hostname (or IP address) of your computer, and the target directory from /home/archive/blahblah to /whatever. Note the "dpkg -l" to get a list of installed packages, this will help you remember what you had installed! The "gconf" bit lists out all the wifi access points defined so that you can copy/paste the details back in later.

#!/bin/sh

dpkg -l > /root/dpkg-l.txt

gconftool -R /system/osso/connectivity/IAP > /root/wifi-list.txt

rsync   -avz                    \
        --exclude=/dev          \
        --exclude=/media        \
        --exclude=/mnt/initfs   \
        --exclude=/proc         \
        --exclude=/sys          \
        /                       \
        mypc.example.com:/home/archive/mytablet/

Wiping Clean

Wiping your table clean is achieved by reflashing. If you upgraded to your current version of maemo rather than flashing the latest version, you'll get a small performance boost by doing this. Flash according to Updating_the_tablet_firmware.

Restoring

Backing up and reflashing were the easy parts, restoring takes a bit longer, and is a bit more tedious. This is where you should only restore things that were definitely properly working before you started, restoring broken configuration files is a bad idea!

As well as reinstalling all the applications you want, you'll need to install (dropbear) ssh & sshd in order to copy the files back on. Be sure to set a password for user "user" and also probably root!

BTW, be sure not to be running the application which uses the files being restored!

wifi access points

Although you'll have to manually re-enter the wifi access points, it's easier when you don't have to tediously type in WPA pass phrases as you can copy/paste then from the file created during the backup. Restore this file:

cd /home/archive/mytablet/root
scp -pr wifi-list.txt root@mytablet.example.com:

Then view this file in a shell (install xterm, run it, "sudo becomeroot", "more wifi-list.txt" whilst setting up access to a wireless AP.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks are easy.

Close the browser first, then simply copy them from your archive to the tablet thus:

cd /home/archive/mytablet/home/.bookmarks
scp -pr * user@mytablet.example.com:/home/user/.bookmarks

The bookmarks should appear straight away.

Contacts

Contacts are stored in /home/user/.osso-abook, however, you need to create a dummy entry BEFORE restoring the files.

So, run the accounts application and create a contact, any old rubbish will do.

Then exit the contacts application and restore the files thus:

cd /home/archive/mytablet/home/user/.osso-abook
scp -pr . user@mytablet:/home/user/.osso-abook

RSS Feeds

The RSS feeds are stored as a bunch of files, very easy to restore.

Close rss reader. Copy the files back thus:

cd /home/archive/mytablet/home/.osso_rss_feed_reader
scp -pr * user@mytablet.example.com:/home/user/.osso_rss_feed_reader

gPodder

Close gpodder. Copy the gpodder config directory back thus:

cd /home/archive/mytablet/home/users/.config/gpodder
scp -pr * user@mytablet.example.com:/home/user/.config/gpodder

Since gpodder keeps the downloaded podcast audio files on a flash memory card, they should be available immediately.