On Sun, Oct 09, 2005 at 09:27:53PM -0500, Dan Martin wrote:
That's the trick - keeping the OS, software, etc. For data, I copy to USB all the time. But I have no way of booting if something happens to the hard drive - hopefully by having a ghost of it I can pop in a new drive if it fails, and restore from the ghost via USB.
Mondo is quite a helpful tool for the system side of things. It creates a set of bootable CDs or DVDs, which are bootable and have the partitioning information stored as well. It isn't as handy as some programs for selective backups and restores, but can do a bare-metal restore from nothing but the backup disks themselves.
It has saved my bacon a couple of times now, once when bad RAM allowed my root filesystem to be corrupted beyond repair, and again when a drive died on the old PC I use as a Linux-based firewall. Being able to get back up without going through an entire reinstall-then-restore dance is quite a boon. In the case of the firewall box, I was back up after 1/2 hour, including small config changes to restore to an alternate drive.
Cheers, Tim