Re: Popular Backup Tool

On Tue, 4 Jul 2006, in the Usenet newsgroup linux.redhat, in article
<Rooqg.11060$j7.315198@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Noel wrote:

What is the most popular tape backup tool used to backup Linux production
servers? Is there a popular free one, or a commerical product such as the
Arcserve agent.

Google is probably your best friend here. There are a number of products
available

I am thinking of a tool that can be used for fast disaster recovery, so
that excludes tar and cpio (ie includes disk partition configs, boot
sectors, mbr, total system backup, etc)

OK, you said "production servers". Generally, we have very few hardware
configurations, and everything is pretty standardized. Our recovery is
basically dropping the box onto the bench and fixing the hardware problem
that generally caused the failure, then pouring a new install of the
operating system back onto the drive (I'm told we average 20 new installs
a week, so everything is pretty well automated), then pouring the actual
data from the nightly backups as would be normal in a backup/restore
situation.

If that is a little above what you'd be doing, basically, having a paper
copy of the partition table taped to the top of the hard drive, and
either doing a minimal install (enough so that you can talk to the device
that has the backups) or having a generic O/S backup (that only has
that minimal install, and needs to be individually corrected for hostname
and IP address may be the way to go. Remember that the boot loader is
probably not practical to back up, as it contains the location of the
kernel and such in a CHS type of format - can you guarantee that your
restore is going to put the kernel/etc. back onto exactly the same disk
sectors? What happens when you change hard drive models?

Have you looked at the HOWTOs?

* Linux-Complete-Backup-and-Recovery-HOWTO
Updated: Mar 2006. A step-by-step tutorial on how to back up a Linux
computer so as to be able to make a bare metal recovery, and how to make
that bare metal recovery. Includes some related scripts. "Bare metal
recovery" is the process of rebuilding a computer after a catastrophic
failure.

257722 Apr 12 16:09 Linux-Complete-Backup-and-Recovery-HOWTO

Old guy
.

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