david <da...@kenpro.com.au> writes: > Daniel Pittman wrote: >> david <da...@kenpro.com.au> writes: >> >>> I've got the following: >>> >>> 2 x servers - single small hard drives in each >>> 1 x desktop - four hard drives including one removeable drive in a caddy >>> intended solely for back up purposes.
[...] >>> What's the current best practice for back up in this kind of >>> situation? >> >> It varies. Personally, I take advantage of the fact that a Linux system >> has no magic "metadata", so a copy of all the files is enough to perform >> a bare-metal restore. > > So this suggests to me that I could make a <# cp -a> of my root/boot > drive onto an empty drive which I then remove and take off-site, > rsync'ing it periodically? Yes, that would be sufficient to provide a "bare metal" recovery copy of your system. > Or is it necessary to use dd? Absolutely not. > Where does the MBR fit into this? Ah. Now, /that/ isn't part of the filesystem image, but is part of the "partition, etc" part of the recovery process. It is generally[1] sufficient to chroot into the restored system and rerun the grub installer, or use the "fix the boot setup" option in your rescue system.[2] When I said that Mondo wrapped up some of this nicely, I meant that it captures the partition map, LVM and MD configuration, and handles reinstalling the boot loader after recovery. None of that is strictly /hard/, but it is a set of things to learn how to do, and something most people don't get a lot of practice in. > The problem with any back up system is that normally you only find out > that it works for sure when you really *need* it to work. *nod* You know the *really* good thing about the widespread availability of virtual machine software? "Free" bare metal to test recovering systems to. :) Regards, Daniel If you have a full copy of all your data, though, your worst case path is "install a new system, copy the data back", so you can't loose /too/ badly. Footnotes: [1] As in, on any sane, modern platform, which definitely includes current Debian and Ubuntu, but doesn't include RHEL 4 and, IIRC, 5 series systems. Unless your hardware is absolutely identical. [2] I keep a grub boot CD in my "rescue" kit, since it can also be used to reinstall the system, and it can read the existing menu.lst file. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html