My recommendation of Mondo was based on the assumption that you wanted to restore your OS with its configuration, not to have an up to the second "consistent" backup (as some others assumed). Based on what you've written below, it sounds like my assumption was correct. The idea is to get a bootable system that has the same configuration, not track every last entry in /var/log/messages :)
I think the kickstart + config tool is also a great option, but it depends on the scenario. It assumes you have a kickstart server and "management" server already installed and configured (depending on the config tool) - if you are in a D/R scenario, that might not be a feasible solution. In my normal support mode, I am using backups (with HP's Data Protector) only to recover from a human "oops" - I can rebuild my systems in about 15 minutes with kickstart + our homegrown config tool. One other thing to keep in mind is that Mondo is really designed to restore back to the same physical hardware (or at least very similar hardware) as its backing up your full system configuration. Kevin -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tim Edwards Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2009 6:48 AM To: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (Tikanga) discussion mailing-list Subject: Re: [rhelv5-list] Re: Online / rootpartition backups forbare metalrecovery Chris Adams wrote: > Once upon a time, John Summerfield <[email protected]> said: >> You cannot make good backups of files that are open for writing, unless >> the application (eg dbms) itself can make the backups. > > If you install on LVM, you can make backups that are at least as good as > "yank the plug". If you have a database server that can flush and > freeze on command (e.g. in the simple case MySQL), you can snapshot the > filesystem and release the database. This takes just a moment (no > shutdown required). > > The only thing you can't currently do with Linux LVM is to freeze and > snapshot all filesystems simultaneously. So, if you have actively > updated data spread across multiple filesystems, it may not work the way > you want. > > The only filesystem where you can't use LVM is /boot, but I mount /boot > read-only except when loading updates, so it is always consistent. Thanks to all who replied so far. I'm currently testing mondorescue, although only in VMWare at the moment. Ed Brown made the suggestion that I should use kickstart and a good config mgmt. system like puppet. This would probably be the ideal solution, however to get correct, updated kickstart configs for all the servers as well as collecting config files into puppet and getting people to work through that seems like a lot of work. I'll post here how I get on, I might also ask the mondo mailing list or forum about the online backup issue. To clarify, the data on those machines is backed up by another mechanism. I just need to get the boot loader, partitioning layout and operating system up and running so that the data backups can then be restored. Tim _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
