Fsarchiver

FSarchiver is a new tool that helps take snapshots (much like Acronis true Image does on Windows). With Ubuntu there is a rather mature solution, namely partimage.

Partimage has several problems:

• It does not support multithreaded compression.
  
• It has stopped being actively developed, and
• does not seem to work well with lvm.
  

FSarchiver seems to be a better option as it resolves this option. The problem is that it is not yet packages for ubuntu and a compilation from source is required. Below information is given on how to compile it and also how to backup a snapshot of a partition (using the LVM snapshot function).

The website for fsarchiver is here

To have full functionality (i.e. lzma compression support the xz utils is needed). Download this from
here

Step 1: FSarchiver installation
Make sure you have some of the required packages:
apt-get install zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libbz2-dev liblzo2-dev e2fslibs-dev attr-dev libssl-dev libblkid-dev uuid-dev

Download the source code for fsarchiver and xz utils and untar it
cd
tar xvfz xz-4.999.8beta.tar.gz
tar xvfz fsarchiver-0.5.8.tar.gz

First let's build the xz utils:
cd xz-4.999.8beta/
./configure; make;make check
and verify that all tests are passed. Then do:
make install

cd ../fsarchiver-0.5.8
./configure --enable-static
make;make install
cd ../xz-4.999.8beta/
make uninstall
cd ..
rm -rf fsarchiver-0.5.8 xz-4.999.8beta/

And you will have fsarchiver installed (with all options regarding compression support) on /usr/local/sbin

Step 2: Creating an LVM snapshot and an image of useful directories (can be used to
restore system in case of failure).



To restore
fsarchiver restfs -j 4 backup_name.fsa id=0,dest=/dev/vgname/lvname
id=0: Is used in case the archiver has more than one filesystems...
-j 4: Use all four cores.

To display information regarding the partitions and the current filesystems:
fsarchiver probe simple

To see the details of an archive use:
fsarchiver archinfo backup_file.fsa