I've actually done this a few times, there are several tools available to you depending on your exact needs. Look into Mondoarchive http://www.mondorescue.org, partimage http://www.partimage.org, and clonesys http://www.trickytools.com/php/clonesys.php

I personally used partimage, but it took a bit of fighting to get it to deal with soft-raid and LVM, but I got it done. Mondo used to work well for me, but I fought with it for a week and got no where. I of course found clonesys after the fact, so I cant offer an opinion on it.

Matt

On 8/1/06, djgoku [email protected] wrote:

On 8/1/06, Jack [email protected] wrote:

...

Well, I've done it again.

My /var partition went south today on my server. I couldn't find my backup media. It wasn't a full backup anyway. For some reason that partition kept my system from booting. Not sure what's going on there, unless I had a link from /usr to /var (a very real possibility).

Anyway! I've just bought a DVD+RW writer for the server. The goal is to make a complete backup of the system onto a DVD, that can be used to rebuild the system.

Question 1: Is it possible to 'dd' directly onto a DVD medium, so that it could be 'dd'ed back onto a new HD?

You could boot to a LiveCD and if you have a spare HD dd if=/dev/device of=/dev/difdevice.iso, then burn to DVD or CD. You could also tar the directorys you want to save and reinstall. I don't know what OS you are using, but most all my changes on my OpenBSD systems are in /etc, /home, and for the exception of my webserver /var/www/. So for me I just tar /etc /home and /var and reinstall in an event of a problem. Doesn't really take to long to have a fully working server/workstation for me, you mileage may vary.

...

Question 2: How would one best copy the entire file structure onto a dvd to make it a bootable media, so that it could be used as a boot device?

Answers must be suitable for a CLI only system as this is a server and has no X.

---

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On Wed, 2006-08-02 at 08:01 -0700, David Spake wrote:

I know there are several utilities whereby you could actually mount the backup image as a complete drive. Can't say that I've used any of them as most of our stuff is NTFS related (thus we use NTFSClone). At any rate, I know that several of the utilities mentioned in crash3m's post stated the possibility of mounting the backup image as a full 'drive'. Hate to think of the access speed on a DVD+R/W, but it might be something to consider for immediate quick access.

Yes, squashfs implements this for Linux. However, since no file systems available for any consumer-level operating systems implement large multi-file atomic copy operations, a safe backup this way can only be made from an initramfs or some other way of accessing the backup target while it is mounted read-only.

I dont recall the exact problem unfortunatly. I believe it may have been mindi or kernel related thought.

Matt

On 8/2/06, Jack [email protected] wrote:

Thanks Matt,

As usual you have excellent suggestions.

Mondo looks like it will be well suited for disaster recovery. I like tht is shouldl allow restoring from the baremetal and that you can change the disk geometry.

Can you tell me what it was that you fought with that made you switch?

Brian JD

----- Original Message ---- From: crash3m [email protected] To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, August 1, 2006 4:32:38 PM Subject: Re: Backups

I've actually done this a few times, there are several tools available to you depending on your exact needs. Look into Mondoarchive http://www.mondorescue.org, partimage http://www.partimage.org, and clonesys http://www.trickytools.com/php/clonesys.php

I personally used partimage, but it took a bit of fighting to get it to deal with soft-raid and LVM, but I got it done. Mondo used to work well for me, but I fought with it for a week and got no where. I of course found clonesys after the fact, so I cant offer an opinion on it.

Matt