Re: Best way to backup a cygwin installation ?

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Mon, 29 Sep 2003, Olaf Foellinger wrote:

> Hi,
>
> what is the best way to backup a cygwin installation ? I have a working
> installation here on w2k with a size of appr. 700 MB. I use ntsec and I
> wonder which is the best way:
>
> - - copy the file sin windows ?
> - - make a tar.gz archive under cygwin ?
>
> I want a possibility to turn back to this version in case the upgrade to
> 1.5.x fails.
>
> Gruss Olaf Foellinger

Olaf,

You probably want to make a tar archive under Cygwin to keep the
permissions and the ownership.  To make sure you can actually extract that
archive, you should make extra copies of tar.exe, gzip.exe, cygwin1.dll,
cygiconv-2.dll, and cygintl-2.dll into your backup directory.  When you
extract, make sure to explicitly use the tar from the backup directory,
and that no other Cygwin processes are running at the time.

It would be a good idea to also back up your mount table in a file called
"mounts.bat" in the same directory (by using the output of "mount -m"),
and then restore them after untarring the backup.  You will need to make
an extra copy of mount.exe (no dependences).  So, your backup directory
will probably look like:

    cygiconv-2.dll
    cygintl-2.dll
    cygwin1.dll
    cygwin-backup.tgz
    gzip.exe
    mount.exe
    tar.exe

Hope this helps,
	Igor
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