[lug] fork from network drives as backup

[David L. Anselmi]

D. Stimits wrote:
> Wow, too many things to reply to! Backup seems to be a popular topic.
> 
> Well, it looks like someone hit the nail on the head...backup can't be 
> answered before knowing how to restore. I'm shifting towards the idea of 
> backing up home directories, and a few archived files like /etc/ configs 
> and subversion repositories.

That should be pretty easy to do.  If you want to be able to recover the 
whole machine after reinstalling it, you might also want your list of 
installed packages, probably in /var.  And maybe your partition table.

The nice thing about a complete system backup is you won't forget to add 
new things to the backup list when you add e.g. a new subversion 
repository.  But maybe you don't need that (if you back up everything 
under /etc, /home, and /svn there may be little need).

[...]
> But...I've never really run into the concept of using bare metal 
> restores of existing installs via backup. What does it take? Just 
> something like amanda running on a backup server with a NIC and services 
> like NFS/bootp/dhcp? Or does this depend on the distribution of linux?

Depends what your backup software is, how easy it is to run from a 
bootable CD or similar, and whether the machine being restored is the 
backup server itself ;-)

Here's what bacula has to say:

http://bacula.org/rel-manual/Disast_Recove_Using_Bacula.html

and partimage:

http://www.partimage.org/Partimage-manual_Usage

(but pay attention to:

http://www.partimage.org/Partimage-manual_Usage#Making_a_backup_of_the_partition_table 
)  (Well, the sfdisk command should be sufficient.  The dd part isn't 
needed, I think.)

Dave