[Server-devel] easy backup solution for Linux?

John Watlington wad at laptop.org
Tue Mar 18 22:28:19 EDT 2008


On Mar 18, 2008, at 1:33 PM, Aaron Huslage wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm new to this party, but it seems to me that restoring the server  
> and restoring the data on it are two different problems. I've done  
> lots of backup work in my career, and I never back up the OS  
> because it is easily retrieved in a hurry.

My argument exactly.

> In the case of XS, it would seem particularly easy to have a couple  
> of USB keys with the OS ready to install and a simple script to  
> grab the configuration files and data off of a server on the  
> Internet or another USB key (Mondo may do this, I'm not sure). This  
> would reduce both bandwidth and storage requirements significantly  
> since you won't have redundant data stored all over the place.

A colleague's counter-argument is that an incremental backup system  
can be
seeded with the production build, to minimize redundant data  
transfer.  It also
catches any local customizations not captured in the configuration info.

I would like to minimize, if not eliminate, such local customizations...

This is still an open technical argument.   Comments ?

> On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 6:16 AM, Bryan Berry <bryan at olenepal.org>  
> wrote:
> thanks Greg,
>
> I think rsync is the way to go to back up the data but we need a nice
> tool to totally restore the boot image. To do that we are using Mondo
> because it is super easy, however I doubt it supports restoring the  
> boot
> image to totally different hardware. We may later consider LiveBackup
> for that reason

One of my big disappointments with Fedora LiveCD is that after  
installing
an image, it is specific to that hardware.   Once first boot happens,  
further
customization of the image (to network hardware) happens.

This is a point in favor of:
OS + config info + system state (ejabberd database, user database &  
info) <=> school server

This also allows enables the case of restoring:
[new] OS + [new] config info + old system state => new school server

We are really close to supporting a consise declaration of config info,
I was waiting for Martin to start full time before doing so.

Cheers,
wad






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