[lug] Backup

[David L. Anselmi]

Siegfried Heintze wrote:
> Regarding our earlier discussion on December 20:
> 
> So let us suppose I get hacked or type fdisk by accident or a drive fails.
> 
> Do I have a disk to boot from if
> (1) I buy hosting and send rdiff backups off site?
> (2) I backup to a USB disk?
> (3) I backup to a consumer grade network disk?
> 
> I believe in each scenario, I have to get out the installation CDs/DVDs and
> install the operating system to boot.

No.  You need something to boot from that will allow you to restore your 
backups.  Knoppix can probably do that for home grown backup systems. 
For things like Bacula, read their docs on disaster recovery.

> If it is a hardware failure, I have to purchase a new hard drive. I'm
> really slow and it takes me a terribly long time to rebuild a dual
> boot windows/linux system by the time you include all the software
> development software.

Well, that depends.  You can improve your install process so that a new 
install is at least easy and reliable, if not quick (and maybe quick too).

> I guess one can boot from the network

Network, CD, what's it matter?  You have to have something to boot from 
to restore your system.  But that isn't a full install in most cases.

> Is there a better way to mitigate this other than my procedure of weekly
> connecting a second drive and using "telinit 1 ; cp /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2"?

(You probably mean cp /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1.)  Does this actually solve 
your problem?  Can you boot from /dev/sdb after you've taken out sda and 
put sdb in its place?  Have you tried it?  (You may be missing a useful 
MBR on sdb.)  It doesn't seem to help you with a dual boot system either.

Dave