Re: [gentoo-user] Re: tools to clean up /usr/portage/packages?

[Mark Knecht]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Paul Hartman
<paul.hartman+gentoo@×××××.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 5:30 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@×××××.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 3:18 PM, Paul Hartman
>> <paul.hartman+gentoo@×××××.com> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 4:49 PM, Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@×××××.de> wrote:
>>>> On 28/02/12 00:41, Mark Knecht wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Are there any tools that will:
>>>>>
>>>>> 1) Ensure that for every installed packages there is a corresponding
>>>>> tbz2 file in /usr/portage/packages?
>>>>>
>>>>> 2) Remove any older versions in /usr/portage/packages prior to me
>>>>> running a backup?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I think app-portage/gentoolkit can help with its "eclean" tool
>>>> (specifically, "eclean-pkg").
>>>>
>>>> "man eclean" should get you started.
>>>
>>> And as an example of savings... I run eclean once in a while, but not
>>> automated. I just ran it and got these results:
>>>
>>> [   14.8 G ] Total space from 1673 files were freed in the distfiles directory
>>>
>>> I guess I should use it more frequently. ;)
>>>
>>
>> 15GB is a nice clean up!
>>
>> I don't think I'd want to run it automatically, at least not often. If
>> it automatically deleted things that work in favor of newly built but
>> untested packages that would defeat the purpose in my mind.
>>
>> As basically nothing but a home user I'm trying after 12 years to
>> piece together some sort of a backup strategy here, including how to
>> do a restore if a drive died, etc. I'll ask some questions about that
>> later, but likely it should be it's own thread.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Mark
>
> You can probably just exclude /usr/portage from your backup entirely,
> since it'll be restored with an emerge --sync (or webrsync) and any
> distfiles can be downloaded again if they are needed.
>

Agreed.

My server has about 400GB to back up. Roughly 360GB is virtual
machines which get backed up daily already so I have that handled.

Of the other 40GB it seems that (excluding portage, /var and a few
other things) I need to back up about 24GB which I think can be backed
up live. I'm not really worried about restoring the exact state of the
machine in one pass. This isn't a business, etc. I just want to get
back fairly quickly to where I was before the presumed failure. I
figure if I get:

/home
/boot
/usr/src
/etc
/var/lib/portage

and maybe one or two more, then a restore would hopefully be something
like doing a quick install as per the Gentoo docs and then laying this
stuff on top and doing an emerge -ke @world.

Or at least that's what I'm trying to puzzle together.

I'm planning on trying it with an additional hard drive as a test.
I'll have to modify fstab as the main system is a 5 drive RAID6
monster and for testing I just want a single drive to verify that it
works.

QUESTION: As for ensuring that every package actually has a
corresponding tbz2 file in the packages directory, would

emerge -ek @world

install everything from packages except in the case of something not
existing in which case it would build and store it?

Thanks,
Mark