[lug] fork from network drives as backup

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 08:29:28PM -0600, D. Stimits wrote:
>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?

One of the ideas I've wanted to implement, but haven't had time, is to
cooperate with the system package database for backing things up.
Walk the file-system and check them against the package database.  If the
file is an unmodified copy of something provided by the system packages,
ignore it.  Otherwise, save it.  You'd also need to save a list of packages
on the system.

Then, recovery would just involve doing a re-install from the normal
channels, making sure the same set of packages was installed, and then
de-archive all the files that were saved.

Thanks,
Sean
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