Backup tool?

[Brian McKee]

On 07/08/06, John Dangler <jdangler at atlantic.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-08-07 at 15:33 +0200, Florian Diesch wrote:
> > "Aron Lopes Petrucci" <aron at uel.br> wrote:
> >
> > > Now I'd like to backup it, something like a snapshot. So, if it crashjes, I
> > > can restore it in this position.
> > >
> > > I found some backup tools, but they are dinamic tools, wich record data in
> > > some folder. It's not a good idea if the hardware crashes. I'd like
> > > something wich records on CDs.
> > >
> > > Can anybody tell me about any util to do this?
> >
> > ,----[ ~/bin/pkgdesc mondo ]
> > | Package: mondo
> > | Description: powerful disaster recovery suite
> > |  Mondo is reliable. It backs up your Debian GNU/Linux server or workstation to
> > |  tape, CD-R, CD-RW, NFS or hard disk partition. In the event of catastrophic
> > |  data loss, you will be able to restore all of your data [or as much as you
> > |  want], from bare metal if necessary. Mondo is in use by numerous blue-chip
> > |  enterprises and large organizations, dozens of smaller companies, and tens of
> > |  thousands of users.
> [snip]
> Mondo / Mindi also has alot of problems.  I tried for almost 2 months
> (unsuccessfully) to get it to work on 2 other distro's.  When confronted
> directly with some of the more basic functional errors, email responses
> were vague and argumentative at best...  Unless something has really
> changed with this package - don't rely on it.

I've imaged quite a few different computers with it, and used it for
bare metal restores several dozen times.  Nothing exotic (LVM or RAID)

It isn't the friendliest thing in the world, it won't boot with some
cdroms, and it's confusing at times.
On the other hand, once you get it to make a good image, it will
always restore.   In addition, your  data is stored in cpio archives,
so it's always recoverable, even if you can't get it to do a bare
metal restore for some reason.

In my case I can do a boot from CD and restore from NFS faster than I
can do just a base install from  CD.

A caveat to all this is I'm not using the current version - so it's
possible things have changed somewhat with the change of project
ownership - but I find it invaluable.    A real case of YMMV it seems.

Brian