[Gllug] re: system recover from 'bare metal'

[Tethys]

"t.clarke" writes:

>Personally, I found on a SCO Unix system (no flames please !!), that the
>quickest way to achieve a 'bare metal' recovery is to:
>a) boot from a floppy (so the root filesystem is unmounted)
>b) use 'dd' or equivalent the stream the entire naked root filesystem
>   partition to tape
>c) take a manual note of the exact partition size

This is essentially how all bare metal backups work. You keep a
complete copy of the data (Whether that's a dd of the partition, or a
tar of the filesystem, it doesn't really matter[1]), and a note of the
disk configuration. Then to restore, you simply boot (from a floppy,
CD, or ideally from the network) with a minimal image that recreates
the disk configuration (by repartitioning, and creating filesystems if
necessary), and then just restore all the data. Your system is now in
exactly the same state as before[2]. I don't know why more people don't
do bare metal backups.

Tet
	
[1] If you're using dd, then pipe it through gzip -- it generally
    compresses quite well, and since backup media tend to be slower
    than your disk, it's worthwhile.

[2] If you're using tar rather than dd, then files may be in different
    blocks on the disk, and it's possible that a few rare applications
    may actually have problems with this.
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