system recovery

[Emir Faisal]

Hello,
We are about to take several linux server to production. What system files we need to backup to make fast system recovery, and how ?

Thank you,
EF

[Stf]

Hello,

I think all filesystem are important (/usr /etc /opt /var / even /home ...).

There is different way to backup your system:

-> you can backup all the disk with dd command, even the boot area will be backup:
# dd if= of= bs=1024 or 2048

-> you can backup only the fs by tar command or cpio, but to recovery a system you will reinstall first a new system and then recover your tape backup :
# tar -cvf /dev/rmt/ /etc /usr /var ...

I hope this could be helpful...

Stf ;-)

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

There are several option:

1) create image of your whole system and burn on CDs or DVD or save on network storage.
Ghost, Mondorescue and others know to do this.

IMHO, the best method if your data doesn't change every day

2) use home-made scripts which will backup your data. In this case for restore you should install system from scratch and restore data from your archive

3) use some commercial system [Veritas and many others] for backup.

[xyko_1]

Hi Emir,

We have a very strong structure to do what you want. And better, it works for linux and windows systems. I'll try to explain our environment to you.

1 - We have a server running linux that we call a image server. It is a stage point to save our systems images.
2 - All images are backed up on tape after they are saved on the server.
3 - We use a bootable CD linux distro that has a software called partimage that we use to copy all disk images to the image server. The distro that we use is kurumim, a brasilian one based on knoppix.
4 - We also save all partions schema to redo it on a new disk (or full machine) if necessary before restore the saved images. We use sfdisk to do that.
5 - We also save the mbr image and use sfdisk too.

Saving or restoring images from/to a server is donne booting from cd, configuring the network environment (nic, default dateway, dns, etc...), accessing the image server via samba, redoing the disk partition if necessary, saving or restoring the partitions, saving or restoring the mbr and rebooting ther server from disk again.

That's the hole process in a big picture.

Hope it helps.
Xyko