On Thu, 5 May 2011, Les Mikesell wrote:
On 5/5/2011 3:37 PM, Dag Wieers wrote:
I can recommend ReaR (Relax and Recover) for migrations and cloning systems. I have been working wit the Relax and Recover project for the past few months together with a colleague and it now covers a lot of situations:
HWRAID (SmartArray), SWRAID, DRBD, partitions, encrypted partitions, LVM
It supports bootable tapes (OBDR), ISO images and USB media
It supports backup software for restoring (like Bacula, TSM, rsync and others)
And it can also take care of backups (using rsync, tar) using different solutions (NFS, USB, Samba, ...)
It's modular, so with little effort you can implement your own workflow or use-case
What I've really always wanted in this respect is something that would work with backuppc such that you could run something on the source to generate descriptions of the partitions and filesystems (sort of clonezilla-like) in files that would be included in backups, and have a bootable restore OS that would know how to get this info from the backuppc server (could be an http request), build the matching filesystems, then run the ssh command to generate a tar image and extract into the right place. Backuppc already does a great job of managing file-level backups but it is somewhat cumbersome to re-install by hand on bare metal and it doesn't automatically keep a description of the layout.
Well, I've become very fond of rbme as of lately, but since ReaR supports rsync out of the box, you don't need a separate backup method for it.
But if backuppc has a client, or a configuration, it's very easy to make ReaR aware of it. And then to only configuration you would need to do is:
BACKUP=BACKUPPC
and it would automatically create a bootable image with your system's layout and the backuppc software/configuration, and even the necessary commands to automatically recover your system when doing:
rear recover
on the rescue prompt. That's how it is done with Bacula, TSM, and others.
However I would stress to test a complete disaster recover scenario for your systems (different technologies) in order to understand if everything is supported. You don't want to realize a problem in disaster-mode :)
I already trust backuppc on the 'save a copy' side. I'd rather not replace that part.
Does backuppc take care of restoring HWRAID, SWRAID, DRBD, LVM, paritions, filesystems ? If so, then ReaR may not be for you, because ReaR takes care of those items.
If you need more help, feel free to join the ReaR mailinglist on sourceforge and ask your questions :)
Would a backuppc adapter be feasible?
Definitely, join the list and we can help you implement it.