[lug] fork from network drives as backup

[Paul E Condon]

On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 08:29:28PM -0600, 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. But I've never considered that maybe a 
> scheme that also does backup with the ability to restore to bare drives 
> (like brand new ones) would be nice. I've done kickstart installs on 
> Redhat/Fedora, and PXE booting on diskless clusters with full install 
> via an NFS server.
> 
> 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?
> 

For Debian, Martin Kraft suggests making backups of /etc, /home, /srv,
/usr/local, /var, and /root if you store anything there. All the other
top level directories contain only stuff that is created in a normal
bare metal install of Debian, which is easy enough to do without your
own homegrown substitute the net-install. Other distributions may not
spend the effort that Debian does to segregate fixed and variable
data. YMMV

If you ever need to do a bare metal recovery from backups, you almost
certainly need physical access to the hardware, and probably some new
hardware pieces, so fully automated recovery is really not possible.

Amanda provides lots of features for treating different data according
to different policies. Such features are worthwhile only if you
actually need different policies, and have the time and energy to
establish them. The worst course of action is to establish a fancy set
of policies, and then not find time to enforce them. KISS

-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon at mesanetworks.net