Antony,

ReaR is awesome. You should try it. It really makes backup and restore
to a fully functional system a snap.
What it does is it creates an ISO file that is bootable. It creates your
filesystem identical to the original, restores all files and makes the
new filesystem bootable.
Of course there is a lot more to it than what I just described, but you
get the gist.
As described, it works fine on Debian 11 but fails on Devuan 4.
blkid does not return anything once the ISO is booted because it hasn't
run the restore scripts.
I believe it has to do with not being able to init properly due to
systemd components not being available.
I have a thread started with ReaR on Github. You can follow here if
interested:
https://github.com/rear/rear/issues/2955

Thanks

Manny


On 2023-03-08 10:35, Antony Stone wrote:
> On Tuesday 07 March 2023 at 18:49:19, Manny via Dng wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been a Devuan user for years. I love the systemd freedom it
>> offers.
>> Having said that, recently I wanted to try this backup utility called
>> Relax-and-Recover (Rear).
>> While rear packages are available on Devuan, the utility does not work
>> as expected and I believe it may be due to systemd not being there.
>>
>> So on my Devuan 4 I did "apt-get install rear", and it installed
>> without
>> a glitch.
>>
>> It runs and creates the backup just fine, but then when it's time to
>> restore it blows, up and falls apart. The error is: "cannot mount ISO
>> because there is no /dev/disk/by-label/RELAXRECOVER"
>> I don't know exactly how and why this is, but if I duplicate the same
>> exact steps on Debian 11, it works without a problem.
>
> My first question about this (I've neither heard of nor uses Rear) is:
>
> Does a disk (partition) with that label exist after you have done a
> backup,
> and the restore process is for some reason unable to find it, or is the
> backup
> process not creating a partition with that label?
>
> After doing a backup, what does "blkid" tell you about the partitions
> and
> labels which exist?
>
>
> Antony.