[K12OSN] Mondo Archive on K12LTSP 5.0

[ssanders at coin.org]

Hi all,

I have been a big fan of www.mondorescue.org for a long time. It's a
good way to migrate an existing version to new hardware, and it's also
an easy bare-metal recovery/restore. For my home/test 4.4.2 setup I have
been using a second hard drive and rsync to keep a backup of /home for
the last few years. Mondo was nice, because I could cron a backup to
DVD-ISO images, and only burn them once in a while (not true disaster
recovery, but reliable at the time, assuming no catastrophic HD
failure).

I recently got a Quantum SDLT tape drive, and have been considering good
ways to back up to it. Amanda, BRU and most other official 'backup
software' require a basic OS and that software installed to do a
ground-up restore. I know that backuppc has been working well for many
here, with the ever-decreasing prices of drives, it seems a good way to
back up one or many machines over a network.

I have a separate test install of K12LTSP 5.0 on another machine, and
installed backuppc to look at it, the docs specify that it's use of tape
is not the best, it's more oriented to additional physical drives. A
pure tar -cvf to tape will work of course, but would be more difficult
to maintain incremental backups.

I installed mondoarchive on the new version (it always had a choice to
use tape), and I was quite suprised that there seem to be many things
missing or in the wrong dir. Mindi (the temp kernel/boot stuff) had
several errors about 'cannot find XYZ' (I'm not at the machine now,
cannot quote directly). I could find them, copy into the expected path,
and went on to the next problem. It had wrong versions of libnewt,
libslang, and a few others that I could manually find and get in place.

It's still not working, and I wondered if anyone here has worked with
Mondoarchive on the latest version? The idea of a full system backup on
one removable media is attractive, and Mondo would/could be nice to use.

Mondo does log everything well, and it's suggested to mail the failures
to their mailing list. I will do so, but wanted to check here first, to
see if anyone has had these problems.

thx
ss