On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 8:42 AM, Stephen Powell
<zlinuxman@wowway.com> wrote:
On Mon, 24 May 2010 17:29:54 -0400 (EDT), Peter Easthope wrote:
> Stephen Powell wrote:
>> (3) The need for special backup requirements will be
>> used by the opponents of Linux at my place of employment
>> to oppose further deployments of Linux, ...
>
> What about the carrot approach? Find an even better
> backup method, compatible with Grub 2 and appealing
> to your management for its efficiency.
You're missing the point. The main selling point to management
is that Linux is free. If they have to buy new backup software
in order to accommodate Linux' backup requirements, that will
kill it on the spot. Whatever boot loader I use must not
require new backup software or impose special backup requirements.
And its not just money. As a rule, people like what they know.
The backup people are Windows people, and they'd love an
excuse to complain to management about the backup requirements
of my Linux servers. grub-legacy and grub-pc are non-starters
for me for that reason. Until now, only lilo, as far as I knew,
met all my requirements. It now appears that extlinux may also
work. I'll soon know.
Clonezilla is free, and when using the "saveparts" option to save an image of one partition and not the full hard drive, it includes the MBR and associated data. You can then drop that partition image onto a new/blank disk, that does not have anything in the MBR, and once Clonezilla restores the image to the new partition, will put the MBR in place and the machine boots on its own the next time, with no extra work (I just did this last week with a new hard drive). This has been my experience with using Clonezilla and Lenny, at least. So it may help in your case.
Mark