Greg Wallace wrote:
I need to protect my system from a hard-drive failure. It's on a Dell Optiplex desktop machine with a single hard drive. This Dell only allows me to boot from the single internal disk.
If the hard drive fails then you are up a gum tree. You need a BIOS revision which permits booting from floppy or CD or USB drive. If you can do that maybe you can install SuSE on one of the USB drives even if you have to bootstrap from minimum system on floppy or CD and wait for the USB drive to be recognised? I have 2 usb 2.0 ports and two USB
hard drives with 120G each of storage on them, all available for backups. I am using app 16G in total on my 80G internal drive, so storage isn't an issue. I am currently running 8.1 Pro, my original SuSE version. It would seem to me that the only way to get my system back would be to replace the failed drive in the machine,
If my sole drive failed, would I replace it or replace the machine and start again? I believe the only way to answer that question is with a screwdriver. Remove the drive before it fails and spend an hour or so contemplating the way forward. You are looking at a boat-anchor if you can't quickly recover - not your system but - your productivity. You might spend days trying to get a Dell Opti.. to jump through clever booting hoops when it could be quicker and less expensive to ... 1. buy another machine 2. run them in parallel 3. gradually get one machine totally up-to-date - OS and apps 4. switch daily operations across to that machine 5. update the original machine, aggressively if you like 6. use one or other machine as a local backup for the other (note, you would still use USB drives for off-site backup) 7. every now and then unplug your operational machine and see if you can get back to work quickly on the other. That will quickly indicate any holes in your recovery which will point accurately to deficiencies in your backup procedures. 8. when the OS is updated and you want to go there see 3 above, again. re-install SuSE from the installation CD, then
do a full recovery from one of the USB hard-drives. Currently, I can re-install 8.1 out of the box, overlaying my data, point to a YAST backup, do a full recovery, and everything comes back and works perfectly. When I upgrade to a later version of SuSE (I've tried 8.2, 9.0, and 9.1) and try the same thing, a lot of my software no longer works after the recovery. Apparently, when you move to a later version, you lose the ability to use YAST for full recovery. So, I can either keep all of the software I currently have or I can move to a later version of SuSE, but I can't do both! I have an Oracle Enterprise database server on my Pro machine, which took tons of work to configure. I can't afford to lose it. This is what has been holding me up from moving forward. I am investigating some 3rd party software that I recently purchased that's supposed to a full recovery for you, but I'm not too sure about it after having worked with it for a few weeks. Is there a way to do this type of recovery strictly using some basic software that comes with my SuSE 8.1 Pro? Even if it's a multi-step process, if it would work, I'd like to know how to do it. Can you back up each high-level directory separately and then recover each of those back while your system is running? Any suggestions greatly appreciated,
I would be reluctant to trust a 3rd party to get my particular backup and restore requirements correct. That's because I don't think about backup very much. Like you I focus on restore. Backup is only something you you do so you can restore. I also test my restores so I can identify and plug holes. Regards mike
Greg Wallace