[K12OSN] Backing up a server...best methods

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2004-11-17 at 08:52, David Trask wrote:
> I thought I had made good backups with Mondo,
> but when I went to use it....it wouldn't work.  So....I'm wondering about
> some easy ways to do an entire bare metal backup of my server.

I repeat this a couple of times a month here, but get backuppc
   http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
running on something that has at least 20% of the disk space you
think you should need to hold a week's worth of backups. (Compression
and linking save a lot of space).

> I have
> plenty of space on an NFS share with a full gigabit link between both
> servers.

I'd go with a big cheap IDE drive and back up your nfs server too,
but this will work if you don't have other space available.

A bare-metal restore from backuppc is kind of brute-force command line
stuff at this point but it can be done from a knoppix or similar CD
boot which gives you a lot more chances to get it right than a canned
system like mondo.  Also, you can't beat the ease of grabbing single
files or directories from it and since it runs automatically you'll
always have an up to date copy.


---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com