Boot partition only

[dsm1212]

Sorry, this is a lame question but I don't even want to install this on my nas unless I think it will work. I need to backup my boot partition before a major upgrade. I don't need to backup up the large media storage, sda, which is multi-TB. Can I use rear and limit it to just the / partition which is /dev/md0? It is btrfs and there are some subvolumes also on the same device I want to include. When I clean up subvolumes the partition I need to back up is only about 4GB.

[dsm1212]

I found the exclude_mounts option so I went ahead and installed. Got it working. There were several things it depended on that were not installed when using git clone but I found them all. By default it did not backup subvolumes but it seems all of mine are docker related and they can be easily recreated. Only thing is the backup seems kind of small. If I delete all subvolumes my root partition is 3GB, but the backup is only 1.5GB. It did complain about /sys changing during the backup, but I assume that is normal if I'm backing up the active OS. Maybe due to compression?

[jsmeix]

Regarding backup of files on btrfs with subvolumes see the section
"What is special to backup files on btrfs?" and the generic section
"All filesystems are equal, but some are more equal than others" in
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Disaster_Recovery

Regarding ReaR and backup of files in general see the section
"Relax-and-Recover versus backup and restore" in
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Disaster_Recovery

In general regarding disaster recovery with ReaR
see the initial sections (in particular "Inappropriate expectations")
and "Disaster recovery with Relax-and-Recover (ReaR)" in
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Disaster_Recovery

[pcahyna]

I don't need to backup up the large media storage, sda, which is multi-TB. Can I use rear and limit it to just the / partition which is /dev/md0?

Is md0 on the same physical disk(s) as the data that you don't need to back up? If so, beware, because during recovery, ReaR will reformat those disks, so you would lose the data that you did not include in the backup.