Jarry wrote:
Hi,
I am now looking for some sort of backup & restore solution which would
help me to get my gentoo-server up and running after fatal disk failure.
I want to burn at regular intervals compressed partition images of disk
on internal dvd/rw/ram (4.5 GB should be enough for archiving the whole
disk, without /home partition).
Well, tar and cpio are good choices because they are available on the
Gentoo live CD. If you chose another program, you will just need to
make sure that you have a static binary of it available at recovery time
(copying this to your recovery media is the best choice).
I am currently using 'dar' to backup to external USB hard disk. Dar is
also useful for backing up to DVD media though, because it has good
support for creating archive 'slices' that will fit nicely on a DVD,
just in case you decide to backup /home as well.
It is in portage, but if you are interested, check out
http://dar.linux.free.fr/
For 'quick-and-easy' restoring, I'm not aware of anything that really
automates the process. But generally the steps are:
1. fdisk
2. mkfs
3. mount
4. restore files
5. chroot
6. install boot loader
7. reboot
The difficulty in restoring the files will really depend upon how you
make your backups (always full, incrementals, differentials, etc). A
full backup would always be the easiest, as you only need a single
piece/set of media and one command to do the restore.
The rest of the steps are pretty much exactly the same as for when you
installed Gentoo, so there shouldn't be any real surprises there.
One last thing, if you've only got a single CD/DVD drive, you are
probably going to have an issue to have both the live CD and the backup
media available, since you can't really eject the live CD to insert your
backup disk.
-Richard
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