7.13. Cleaning up and Saving the Temporary System

7.13.1. Cleaning

First, remove the currently installed documentation files to prevent them from ending up in the final system, and to save about 35 MB:

rm -rf /usr/share/{info,man,doc}/*

Second, on a modern Linux system, the libtool .la files are only useful for libltdl. No libraries in LFS are loaded by libltdl, and it's known that some .la files can cause BLFS package failures. Remove those files now:

find /usr/{lib,libexec} -name \*.la -delete

The current system size is now about 3 GB, however the /tools directory is no longer needed. It uses about 1 GB of disk space. Delete it now:

rm -rf /tools

7.13.2. Backup

At this point the essential programs and libraries have been created and your current LFS system is in a good state. Your system can now be backed up for later reuse. In case of fatal failures in the subsequent chapters, it often turns out that removing everything and starting over (more carefully) is the best way to recover. Unfortunately, all the temporary files will be removed, too. To avoid spending extra time to redo something which has been done successfully, creating a backup of the current LFS system may prove useful.

If you are making a backup, mount the partition for backup:

mount -v /dev/sda4 /mnt

Make sure you have at least 1 GB free disk space (the source tarballs will be included in the backup archive) in the partition prepared for backup.

Note that the instructions below specify the home directory of the host system's root user, which is typically found on the root file system. Replace $HOME by a directory of your choice if you do not want to have the backup stored in root's home directory.

Create the backup archive by running the following command:

cd /
tar -cJpf /mnt/lfs-temp-tools-cross-r12.0-337.tar.xz . \
    --exclude="dev/*" --exclude="proc/*"
    --exclude="sys/*" --exclude="run/*"
    --exclude="mnt/*"

Unmount the partition containing the backup:

umount /mnt

7.13.3. Restore

In case some mistakes have been made and you need to start over, you can use this backup to restore the system and save some recovery time. Since the sources are included in the backup archive as well, so they do not need to be downloaded again.

Mount the LFS partition and the backup partition on the host system:

mkdir -pv /mnt/lfs-{target,backup}
mount -v -t ext4 /dev/sdx3 /mnt/lfs-target
mount -v -t ext4 /dev/sdx4 /mnt/lfs-backup

cd /mnt/lfs-target
rm -rf ./*
tar -xpf /mnt/lfs-backup/lfs-temp-tools-cross-r12.0-337.tar.xz

Again, unmount the two partitions, reconnect the device to the target machine, boot it and continue building the rest of system:

umount /mnt/lfs-{target,backup}