Had a little scare last night. My frontend would not boot (failed to mount root) due to a bad sector on the root partition of the hard drive. Thankfully I was able to repair with Seatools.

But this got me thinking about a solid backup. After reading the Mythbackup guide and some other threads I still have some questions on how mythbackup works.

My system has a lot of customization. I have customized the buttons and button order on the home screens, menu backgrounds etc. In addition, I am running some additional software via pacman install, such as xbmc, chromium, etc.

When I have restored from mythbackup in the past, it did a good job restoring my sql tables for recordings, etc; but I lost all my customization including my installed software, lirc, asound.conf, custom display settings, and much more. So my question is, does mythbackup only backup sql related stuff, or am I using it wrong? Is there any command or script that would backup all my custom settings and files to restore those as well?

My ultimate goal would be to do a fresh install on a new drive, and run some type of restore script that would put anything customized back in its place. Since my hard drive is bad, I want to avoid doing a clone from norton ghost or something similar. Just to be clear, I only want to backup and restore the boot/system partition, not /myth

Thanks!

If it hasn't changed too much in 7.x the mythbackup script creates two files:

1) A MySQL DB dump.
2) A tar ball of /root /home /etc and anything else you tell it to (within certain sanity preserving limits).

It only restores selected files from that tar ball by default, but again you can give it a more extensive list of things to restore.

Aside from blacklisted files it will backup and restore just about anything you ask it to.