Backup and Recovery How-To

Charles Curley

           <charlescurley at charlescurley dot com >
        

   Revision History
   Revision 2.1    2006-03-28    Revised by: c^2
   Added notes for NTFS. Edited the To Do list. Started work on LVM and using finnix .
   Revision 2.0    2005-10-12    Revised by: c^2
   Notes for Fedora Core 4. Removed notes for older versions of FC and Red Hat. Also, changes in the writeup and scripts to reflect using Knoppix instead of tomsrtbt . See the scripts for change notes. Changed some scripts so that long lines don't fall off the right side of printed pages (oops).
   Revision 1.8    2005-02-19    Revised by: c^2
   Added notes for Fedora Core 3
   Revision 1.7    2004-05-11    Revised by: c^2
   Adjusted copyright language.
   Revision 1.6    2004-04-29    Revised by: c^2
   Added Knoppix notes, Syslinux, PPART, QtParted, some other rescue CDs, and made some fixes.
   Revision 1.5    2003-12-19    Revised by: c^2
   Fedora 1 and GRUB notes.
   Revision 1.4    2003-08-17    Revised by: c^2
   Some notes on burning CD-ROMs, and more on files to exclude.
   Revision 1.3    2003-04-24    Revised by: c^2
   Substituted new email address and URL for old.
   Revision 1.2    2003-02-12    Revised by: c^2
   Added Red Hat 8.0 notes, support for FAT32, split the first stage restore scripts, and other minor changes. Notes on Amanda .
   Revision 1.1    2002-09-10    Revised by: c^2
   New code to handle ext3 partitions in Introduction , and a note on Introduction .
   Revision 1.0    2002-07-24    Revised by: c^2
   We now use bz2 compression in the first stage, have the run time option to check for bad blocks, and have a script that runs the entire first stage.

Imagine your disk drive has just become a very expensive hockey puck. Imagine you have had a fire, and your computer case now looks like something Salvador Dalĩ would like to paint. Now what?

Total restore, sometimes called bare metal recovery, is the process of rebuilding a computer after a catastrophic failure. In order to make a total restoration, you must have complete backups, not only of your file system, but of partition information and other data. This HOWTO is a step-by-step tutorial on how to back up a Linux computer so as to be able to make a bare metal recovery, and how to make that bare metal recovery. It includes some related scripts.

• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
   
• 1.1. Copyright Information
• 1.2. Disclaimers
• 1.3. New Versions
• 1.4.

* License

* Backup and Recovery How-To Index