Rob Morin wrote: > If possible i would like to hear more talk on doing something like the > restore from live distro as doing reliable and non time consuming > images is a bitch... Are there any docs or detailed procedures on how to > restore to a blank hard drive via a complete back up. I backup up "/" > except for the afore mentioned /proc /tmp bla bla ... but what would a > recommend live cd be? I use Debian Etch for instance....
Knoppix is usually considered the ultimate live cd in terms of hardware detection and included features but you need to make sure that it knows about all the same LVM options, etc. that you are using elsewhere. The process can vary wildly depending on the system you are restoring and the disk layout and boot setup it needs. Basically you have to fdisk, possibly set up LVMs, mkfs and mount something that looks like the original filesystems by hand with the livecd tools, then tell backuppc to deliver a tar image which you extract wherever you mounted what will be the root filesystem - you can do that via ssh. I recently found something that might make it a lot easier with a little work up front: http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/clonezilla-live/. Clonezilla is intended to do mass-cloning of PXE-booted machines over a network. It would work for this purpose but takes some infrastructure setup that might not be available when you need to restore. Clonezilla-live is a variation that can be booted from CD or USB drives and in the USB case can store/load the images directly on the device. I'm just starting to test this myself, but I think a handy approach would be to get a laptop-drive based external USB device (these are very small, run from USB power, and come in sizes up to 250 gigs now), follow the instructions for making a bootable USB clonezilla-live from the link above, and periodically make image copies of the target machines if there are times you can take them down for a few minutes. Then if you need to restore from bare metal, boot from the usb drive and drop in the latest copy you've saved which will include your ssh keys so you can put back anything newer from backuppc. There are several other options, like making bootable CD's or DVD's that include one or more images to restore, or mounting nfs/smb/sshfs network filesystems for the image storage. With ntfs and most linux filesystems,it knows enough to save only the used blocks so it is fairly fast. Perhaps someone could eventually combine the tools so backuppc could use the same format for the disk layout description and mbr (would need client side support or some ssh'd commands to get) and be able to rebuild the disks automatically with the same tools. -- Les Mikesell [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
