Backing Up My Hypervisor - the return

Following on from my previous post on this my hypervisor has been upgraded to Centos 7.3.

REAR is still working well for the backups, here's a few optimisations worth noting....

My new /etc/rear/local.conf:

TMPDIR="/backup/tmp"
export TMPDIR
OUTPUT=ISO
OUTPUT_URL=null
ISO_DIR="/backup/host"
BACKUP=NETFS
BACKUP_URL=file:///backup/host
BACKUP_PROG_EXCLUDE=("${BACKUP_PROG_EXCLUDE[@]}" '/media' '/var/tmp' '/var/crash')
EXCLUDE_RECREATE=( "${EXCLUDE_RECREATE[@]}" "fs:/isos" )

The TMPDIR makes REAR use my backup disk rather than /tmp on the very slow USB stick for creating the backup before moving it to /backup/host/einstein

OUTPUT_URL & ISO_DIR also stop REAR creating the rescue ISO on the USB stick and then copying it over. It's created direct into /backup/host

Recovery is as before. Don't be put off by these warnings, it will still work.

initramfs creation for Kernel 3.10.0-514.10.2.el7.x86_64 failed

You also wont need to recreate the ISO mount point or modify fstab. Everything just works.

Regarding recovery to a larger disk. A simpler solution is to just edit the disk size line in /var/lib/rear/layout/disklayout.conf with the size of the new disk. This will make REAR think the disk matches the original and it will restore without further modification. It will only use the original partition table so the extra space is wasted but for these purposes that's good enough.

disk /dev/sdc 7864320000 msdos

(A 16GB stick would be 16018046976)