The best and traditional way that has been there for decades is an rsync and then reinstallation of boot-loader. It works always if you know how it's done. If you need detailed instructions, I can send you that! On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 10:44 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>wrote: > On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 12:03 PM, Cal Sawyer <cal-s at blue-bolt.com> wrote: > > > > You're right - documentation is pretty dire. Guess i'm not alone in > > hating doing it. > > Yes, I really, really wish the stuff they are doing was documented, > somewhere, anywhere. Not just how to use the program itself which is > supposed to 'just work' unattended once you set it up, but the black > magic of how they detect and reproduce all of the hardware, lvm, raid, > filesystem, etc. across different distributions and versions. > > > USB backup is broken due to the order in which path variables get set - > > sure is lot of fun trawling through the scripts to find out what gets > > set when. Hope the ReaR maintainers are interested in this and haven't > > gotten themselves mired in tape > > archive integration - i would have thought USB backup was the winner in > > terms of getting broad acceptance as a bare-metal DR solution. > > USB is sort of 'hands-on' for something that should be unattended, and > adds a lot of unpredictable messiness in drive detection, boot order, > etc. All you really have to do is export some NFS space and point > ReaR to it. At least that is the easy way to get started. If you > have another Linux box, just plug your USB drive in there and access > it over NFS... problem solved. > > Clonezilla-live plays in this space too, but it doesn't do raid or > multiple disks at once, and you have to shut down to take the image. > > My 'ideal' system would be to have ReaR generate a directory of what > will be on the boot iso leaving that somewhere on the host without > actually making the image. Then use backuppc to back up the whole > host and its normal duplicate-pooling mechanism will keep the extra > copies of the tools from taking extra space. Then when/if you need a > bare-metal restore, you would first grab the directory of the iso > contents, burn a boot CD, let that reconstruct the filesystem, then > tell backuppc to restore to it. That way would be completely > automatic and always be up to date, with the advantage of backuppc's > efficient storage and easy online access to individual files and > directories. If you don't mind wasting a small amount of space for > the isos, I think that approach would already work if you tell ReaR to > just make the boot image and to wait for an external program to do the > restore after the filesystem has been rebuilt. > > > However, when it works - wow. Just restored an HP dl360 w/HWRAID to a > > Presario desktop machine and it lives! No network, but that's small > > beans compared to the larger win. > > Yes, I've even modified the filesystem layout file to go from a > software RAID to a non-RAID, and to change partition sizes during the > restores. If it was documented, that capability by itself would be > fantastic. > > -- > Les Mikesell > lesmikesell at gmail.com > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos >