Believe backup ISO from mylivecd is too big having trouble finding out why

[wedgetail]

This week it seems that I have got my workhorse KDE-mini running extremely well, I may be wrong but after turning off prelink it seems very smooth. The system is fully updated.  The smooth behaviour could also be my perception after having battled with some weird problem partly showing as very perceptible delays at random when typing and then suddenly this appears normal.

A real good time to make a liveCD backup as the system is rather customised and loosing it would be more than 20 hours work for me to get it right again, assuming no data was lost.

I only run my OS with one directory, the / directory

umount -a indicated about 8 GB to be squeezed, du exercise confirmed the size, in here there would then be about 6 GB in the /Videos directory

Edit:  Have repeated my usual prep stage before running mylivecd, just to be sure to be sure:

[root@localhost gert]# umount -a
umount: /: device is busy.
        (In some cases useful info about processes that use
         the device is found by lsof( or fuser(1))
[root@localhost gert]#
[root@localhost gert]# df
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2              28G   13G   14G  49% /
[root@localhost gert]# du -sm /

Here we go:

[root@localhost gert]# mylivecd --gzip --nodir ^/home/gert/Videos /media/USB465-1B/Data-Recovered-100711/Data/x8-ISO_Files/MyLiveCDs/MiniMe/120130-MiniMe_09-no-tty.iso
mylivecd, version 0.9.4, http://pclinuxos.com/                                                                      
Copyright (C) 2010, Texstar <texstar at gmail.com>

.
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Created '/media/USB465-1B/Data-Recovered-100711/Data/x8-ISO_Files/MyLiveCDs/MiniMe/120130-MiniMe_09a-no-tty.iso' (3365,109,760 bytes) in 00:10:51


[root@localhost gert]#

The last mylivecd

Created '/media/USB465-1B/Data-Recovered-100711/Data/x8-ISO_Files/2011/111015-MiniMe_08-no-tty.iso' (1983,744,000 bytes) in 00:08:07

Of course I don't remember how much I have installed since 111015=15 Nov 2011, but compressed extra 1.3 GB that seems  wrong, like an ISO got mixed up with the system actually my first run there was an  ISO from a download but I found that quickly by looking at file sizes.

I have tried some other way of finding out how much and where is on the partition:

[root@localhost /]# du -sm * | sort -nr | head -150
du: cannot access `proc/9662/task/9662/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `proc/9662/task/9662/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `proc/9662/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `proc/9662/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
7946    home
3371    usr
873     opt
200     var
158     lib
101     tmp
88      root
37      etc
20      boot
18      sbin
14      bin
2       dead.letter


[root@localhost /]# du -sm * | sort -nr | head -150 >>/home/gert/120130-summary_sizes.glk

[root@localhost /]# cd /home

[root@localhost home]# du -sm * | sort -nr | head -150
7944    gert
1       mysql
1       gert2

[root@localhost home]# cd gert

[root@localhost gert]# du -sm * | sort -nr | head -150

6075    Videos

710     Howells
311     LO-Install
190     Downloads
100     Pictures
98      Documents
36      Kollector_Data
34      Desktop
19      draw
15      tmp
[root@localhost gert]#

So / total about 12.794 GB, /Videos total 6.075 GB leaving 6.719 GB to be compressed.  Roughy estimate divide by 3 and I get 2.239 GB.

Having looked at the /usr size perhaps my balance of 'allready' compressed files have grown.

Advice most welcome  

[Neal ManBear]

Questions:     
How much of that 12.794 GB is data from your /home?     
Why "-no-tty?"     

Try to get your size to remaster under 12GB.     

[wedgetail]

Neal ManBear

/home appox 8GB and in /home/gert/Videos I have 6 GB of videos which I thought is taken away by the --nodir option

-no-tty is in the name to remind me that I have no kernel console prepared on this system ( I use this to catch all messages sometimes during boot)

I believe that the mylivecd is ok just trouble to reconcile the jump in size.  

[Neal ManBear]

Mylivecd can create up to a 4GB ISO. f your total installed size exceeds what can be compressed to that, the build will not work. Excluding your videos reduces the size, yes, but you should consider excluding something more.     

[Just17]

If you specify the working directory in the command, the working files will not be deleted automatically, and you can then see what has been excluded etc etc from the ISO.

It would seem that you have put quite a bit on the partition since your previous remaster, and maybe the new files were already compressed ........

You might also consider installing filelight (I dislike it) which has helped me in the past to see where some files were taking up space that I had missed by other means.

[Neal ManBear]

Do you run bleachbit and bleachbit-root before remastering?     

[pinoc]

and check and clean your /tmp and /root folders for potential leftovers from previous crashed mylivecd attempts. If you had a crash you need to reboot, maybe better two times, in order to re-establish system services which were disabled at the beginning of the remastering. Plus you need about twice the space to be remastered as free disk-space because the system is not compressed on the fly.

[djohnston]

And also make sure any previous iso files from previous remasters are not included in the current one.

[wedgetail]

Neal ManBear
No I am not familiar with those, I found them in Synaptic and had a look. I don't quite understand but it looks like something in Windows similar. I will look at closer later.

pinoc & djohnston
To both of you I am familiar with what you are saying (a bit laszy sometimes) but if my ISO exceeds my expectations (say approx 1GB depends on what my record shows I have been doing in that OS)  then I apply the brakes and start investigating. A leftover ISO happens I believe when you don't save the final ISO outside the system. Seems some time since I have had that problem.  /tmp etc is possible.

Thanks all.  I have hunch that my /Videos are not being exempted during processing. The status is that I think I found my rsync of the partition I am looking at.  You can see in another topic that I had some fun getting that started. Now I have however run that and made a liveCD of that as well.  Here is the process from the backup partition which is about 15th January.  It looks right but I am on my toes.

[root@localhost /]# df
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb12             12G  6.0G  4.5G  57% /
/dev/sda2              28G   13G   14G  49% /media/minime2010
[root@localhost /]# umount -a
umount: /: device is busy.
        (In some cases useful info about processes that use
         the device is found by lsof 8 or fuser(1))
[root@localhost /]#

The red is my backup which it seems I did not backup the /Video and it is my expected size in calculations above, so all is fine.
As you can see I umount the /dev/sda2 very simply with th umount -a then start backing up

At this stage a mount (using Konq) the USB465 drive which may have a 30 sec plus wakeup time, then I continue with processing

[root@localhost gert]#
[root@localhost /]# mylivecd --gzip --nodir ^/home/gert/Videos /media/USB465-1B/Data-Recovered-100711/Data/x8-ISO_Files/MyLiveCDs/MiniMe/120130-MiniMe_09Backup -no-tty.iso  < ----- only difference in formula

mylivecd, version 0.9.4, http://pclinuxos.com/
Copyright (C) 2010, Texstar <texstar at gmail.com>

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the rest looks completely fine, I have deleted but availble on request
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Created '/media/USB465-1B/Data-Recovered-100711/Data/x8-ISO_Files/MyLiveCDs/MiniMe/120130-MiniMe_09Backup' (2321,035,264 bytes) in 00:08:47

[root@localhost /]#

I am happy with that however where does that extra 1GB come from.  I am going to recheck my /tmp and then I will delete the /video/ and try again.

I did notice that /usr/ about 3.3 GB I think it was but about the same in both systems. I repeated the closer investigation of of files as in my first post. I won't repeat the result here.