William Hammond wrote:
I have a number of small OpenSuSE 10.3 Samba File Servers.
They have commercial software that does a good job of backing up. but, like most, not such a good job of restoring.
Especially if you need to do a bare metal recovery.
That's not proper backup software -- that's archiving software being (mis-)used as backup software. For example: HP Legato is an archiver. HP OmniBack is a backup solution.
On some of these systems I keep an identical drive already set up so that if needed I can plug it in and do a data only restore.
I don't use or believe that strongly in mirroring or duplexing so I don't want to go there.
Question is: What are the easiest/best solutions for Disaster Recovery...?
Any software from which a "baremetal" recovery involves only these three steps: 1: reinstall OS in vanilla configuration 2: install recovery software 3: run recovery software using NOTHING more than the backup media (i.e. no having to provide magic numbers from on-system records files or typing in by hand like HP Legato requires, etc.)
One that a "Shop Owner" could perform with a little help.
Dump is still very reliable. And you don't even have to do step #2 above. However, instead of specifying dump device -f /dev/mt, I would specify the dump device to be a USB disk, -f /dev/sdwhatever, or even autmounting the USB disk, and using -f /backupdisk/$DATE.$FS where $DATE=`date +%F` and $FS=`echo $FILESYSTEM | tr / _` for example: root filesystem would be dumped into: 2008-05-04._ /home filesystem would be dumped into: 2008-05-04._home /usr/local would be dumped into: 2008-05-04._usr_local
These Servers don't have any "IT" people on staff, but I'd like them to be as independant as possible in a crisis. I'm open to both built in tools (dump/restore rsync, etc.), although I'm not that familiar with them, and commercial..
Dump commands can be put into a script (shell script or tcl/tk, which is runnable by creating an icon on the desktop with "create link to app" on the desktop,
All these systems have DVD Writers and the Backup is to DDS-4 DAT Drives
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