Want ability to restore from failed upgrade.

[Steve Phillips]

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005, Chris W. Parker wrote:

> McDougall, Marshall (FSH) <mailto:MarMcDouga at gov.mb.ca>
>    on Wednesday, February 23, 2005 1:17 PM said:
>
>> I would suggest that you need to get a handle on some of the basics
>> first.
>
> [snip]
>
> I agree! :)
>
>> What OS are you running?  What is your current backup
>> strategy?  What apps are you looking to upgrade?
>
> Don't know if these were rhetorical or not so I'll answer them anyway.
>
> OS: Red Hat 8 and Red Hat 9
> Backup Strategy: tar up /home, /etc, and /var and then ship them off to
> another server.
> Apps needing upgrade: Apache, sendmail, PHP, and MySQL.

except you missed one small point.

I assume you are talking about upgrading the apps themselves, i.e - move 
from apache 1.3 to 2.0, if you do this and it all goes west on you you 
will end up restoring say - an apache 1.3 config file (restore /etc) and 
find that the apache binary (/usr/bin/httpd) is still apache 2.0 and 
you'll end up with a right mess on your hands.

If you really want to back things up then just cpio (or tar, or amanda, or 
whatever) the entire file system less say /proc, and then move that entire 
system backup off to another system/hard drive/tape/etc (you could even 
practice a restore of this to another system to ensure that it all works 
happily and this would also give you a "live" backup waiting to go should 
things go wrong - either that or restore the image to another hard drive, 
cost of around $100 USD, and if stuff goes west then simply plug it in, 
power up and away you go)

-- 
Steve.