Vince Tingey wrote at about 09:58:39 -0800 on Monday, November 23, 2009: > Hello Everyone, > > We have been using BackupPC for about 2 years now and its great for > doing file level backups! However for doing a bare metal restore we had > to first restore from an offline system image of various age then > restore files from the BackupPC server. > > Recently we found a free tool for linux system hot backups offered from > R1Soft. http://www.r1soft.com/tools/linux-hot-copy/ > > It looks like we could use this tool with BackupPC to always have an > up-to-date bare metal image to restore. The downside being losing the > ability to restore individual files from BackupPC unless we also keep a > backup of the files in addition to the image file. This doesn't seem > too bad though as disk space is pretty cheap and we don't have a ton of > servers. I'm also wondering if the storage pooling built into BackupPC > would work on the block level image files create by the Linux Hot Copy > tool to reduce the storage space needed.
Looks interesting - here are my 2 cents 1. First, it's free (or at least the latest Beta is) but no guarantee for the future and it's certainly not Open Source 2. I'm not sure what you mean by: "The downside being losing the ability to restore individual files from BackupPC unless we also keep a backup of the files in addition to the image file." Why would you need to keep the image file? (which according to the FAQ doesn't survive a reboot). Instead, wouldn't you use it more like MS Volume Shadow Copy (to which it claims to be analogous). I.e., you would use the snapshots to create a fixed instance in time that you would then use BackupPC to create a stable file-by-file backup against. For Linux, restoring against this would be no different from rebooting after a system crash. So you would be able to do a full metal restore modulo any data that is affected by a normal crash. Except that since you have backed up the state of the machine, even that wouldn't necessarily be lost. 3. I do like the idea of being able to make stable snapshots on regular block device without needing LVM or xfs. Automating this in DumpPreUserCmd could be interesting... Have you actually tried the software? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
