Hi gurus!
Request for help below. First, what happened.
I had made a copy of some music files/directories I wished to copy to my phone using pcmanfm (I think) but mid copy I got errors "Can't write to readonly filesystem".
Thinking this meant that probably my main drive had errored somehow and switched to read-only mode, I decided to reboot, via the shutdown menu.
OOPS.
Machine would then not boot. It tried to do a on-book fsck, which crashed, but if I interrupted the fsck, it also crashed.
I found a live cd, booted from it, loaded mdadm and reassembled my raid arrays then fscked my two partitions /, /home.
Errors were found and fixed. Basically some inodes multiplly claimed, and a few reference counts were wrong. Files were placed in Lost + Found.
Rebooted & booted OK. Worked out all the lost & Found files were jpgs from my photo albums. sorted them all out.
Rebooted again, but sometimes my desktop won't appear, & I'm left at a text loging prompt.
Q1) If the desktop doesn't appear, which log files to examine? Dmesg & xorg.*.log?
Q2) Any ideas which log files I should check to try and work out what went wrong yesterday? I can't see anything obvious in Kern.log - just a few UFW entries then stuff from when I next booted it.
I backup my files via various methods, but one is an Rsync to a USB drive. I backup using
sudo rsync -av --del / /media/me/USBDrive/ --exclude-from=/home/me/rsynchbackexclude
rsynchbackexclude is a text file containing stuff like /sys/* /dev/* /proc/* /media/* /mnt/* /tmp/* /lost+found/* /var/tmp/* *.iso
I want to "compare" the backup with the live hard disk and see what, if anything, is missing. If anything is missing I'll restore if from a different backup source though. I suspect that I need to do a "dry-run" copy from the USB drive to the live hard disk
q3) Am I right with this command line to do a "dry run" restore, i.e. show me what would copy, which is in effect, what is different between the USB disk and the live drive?
sudo rsync -av --dry-run /media/me/USBDrive/ / --log-file=LogToFile
-v = verbose -a = -rlptgoD =>r recursive l copy links as symlinks ptgo preserve permissions, times, group, owner D preserve device files & special files
--dry-run = do a dry run --list-only = list changes but don't do any --log-file log to file
is this right, or should I do i = itemise changes instead of dry-run?
Any help/advise welcomed.
Thanks Steve