Stoopid but pressing backup question

[Les Mikesell]

Dean S. Messing wrote:

> : I think the OP was looking for an easy way to do a complete restore, 
> : though.  
> 
> `rsnapshot' and `dirvish' provide this, I think[1].  Otherwise these
> backup systems would be pretty useless if one had a RAID0 array
> failure and lost one's entire system.

I wouldn't call them useless. It is better than nothing even if you have 
to do a base system install to get the  replacement system to a point 
where you can restore.  And sometimes you may want to restore on a 
different layout or just grab a copy of a file or directory that was 
accidentally deleted.  Backuppc provides a handy web interface for those 
operations and will let you download a file or tar/zip archive of 
multiple files through the browser.

> : One of the easiest would be to download the bootable iso for 
> : clonezilla live (http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/clonezilla-live) 
> : which will save compressed disk/partition images to local/nfs/smb/ssh 
> : locations and knows enough about linux and ntfs filesystems to only save 
> : the used portions. On restore, it will re-create the partions, copy back 
> : the contents and make the disk bootable for you.
> 
> This sounds nice. I'm not sure if either of the applications I
> menioned remember the partition structure.  One may have to do the
> partitioning separately. It's good to save a copy of `fdisk -l' and
> `vgdisplay -v' with each backup, I suppose. 
> 
> Does clonezilla remember Logical Volume or Software Raid
> info and re-create it too?

It does handle LVM, but doesn't currently do raid.  It is probably still 
usable if you manually create the raid devices first and restore by 
partitions instead of the whole disk.  You can drop to a (debian live) 
shell for certain steps if you know what you are doing.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com