Linux Complete Backup and Recovery HOWTO

Charles Curley

           
        

Revision History
Revision 1.62004-04-29Revised by: c^2
Added Knoppix notes, Syslinux, PPART, QtParted, some other rescue CDs, and made some fixes.
Revision 1.52003-12-19Revised by: c^2
Fedora and GRUB notes.
Revision 1.42003-08-17Revised by: c^2
Some notes on burning CD-ROMs, and more on files to exclude.
Revision 1.32003-04-24Revised by: c^2
Substituted new email address and URL for old.
Revision 1.22003-02-12Revised 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 1.12002-09-10Revised by: c^2
New code to handle ext3 partitions in make.fdisk, and a note on initrd.
Revision 1.02002-07-24Revised 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. Credits
1.5. Feedback
1.6. Translations
2. Overview
2.1. Limitations
3. Preparation
3.1. Installing the ZIP Drive
4. Creating the Stage 1 Back Up
4.1. Theme And Variations
5. First Stage Restore
5.1. Booting tomsrtbt
5.2. Restoration
6. Second Stage Restoration
7. Distribution Specific Notes
7.1. Fedora
7.2. Red Hat 9
7.3. Red Hat 8.0
7.4. Red Hat 7.1
7.5. Red Hat 7.0
7.6. Knoppix
8. Application Specific Notes
8.1. GRUB
8.2. Tripwire
8.3. Squid
8.4. Arkeia
8.5. Amanda
9. Some Advice for Disaster Recovery
10. What Now?
10.1. To Do
11. The Scripts
11.1. First Stage
11.2. Second Stage
11.3. Backup Server Scripts
12. Resources
A. GNU Free Documentation License
0. PREAMBLE
1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
2. VERBATIM COPYING
3. COPYING IN QUANTITY
4. MODIFICATIONS
5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS
6. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS
7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS
8. TRANSLATION
9. TERMINATION
10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE
11. How to use this License for your documents