Re: backup plan bare metal
On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 12:28:15AM -0500, Rodney Richison wrote:
> Would be interested in seeing what some of you use for a backup plan.
> Mainly for servers.
> Tar?
> Easy/quick way to restore bare metal?
Some of the replies you have gotten seem to miss the point of
"bare metal recovery"; which is to come back to your basic system
without out having to think about configuration. It presumes
that your "metal" is the same hardware configuation, more or
less per the particular recovery program. Accordingly the
satisfying ones derive the recovery system from the live
system; this puts the sysadmin in a comfortable environment.
I will recommend the Debian package "bootcd" to your attention,
this is rather like Yard but for cds or dvds, and more modern.
Summarily: bootcd lets you copy a bootable cd from your system,
it lets you exclude directories from the copy.
I have the practice of keeping a spare "rescue" root partition
on most machines. This is occasionally a great convenience.
For me this is just a Debian base install with a few extra
programs.
Grub is also to be recommended over lilo for recovery. Grub
allows a wider range of command decisions to be made at boot time.
rdev is slick but it doesn't offer redundant redundancy, so it
is more convenience than real data safety.
I use cpio to write all my backups. After you dig around to
find a 5.25 floppy drive, or some other old hardware, you do not
want to be trying to determine how to decipher some odd backup
format or look for a 8 year old version of an OS that will run
on current hardware and may run the appropriate restore program,
if you can find a copy of it.
Lastly, Preston's _Unix_Backup_&_Recovery_ seems to be the only
good treatment of the subject.
Be well,
rir
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