Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Bare Metal Backup and Restore (Mondo Part 1)
Backing up your computer has always been a task to complete that has always been at the bottom of everyones list. Most people try to get by with backing up their personal files to CD, Zip Disks, USB thumb drives, etc. But that only saves the “important” data. Exact restore of a crashed system can take a long time without a full restore process. Most people end up recovering their OS from media, then patching their system, then their applications from the application media disks, then downloading all the other tools they want from the Internet, then restoring their personal data, ... What a hassle!
EVERYONE knows that it is a good thing to have a backup of their system but few people don't do it. Why? There are a few simple reasons that prevent people from venturing into doing it:
The backup process is usually a time consuming process.
It takes media feeding.
Expensive backup device to accomplish unattended (e.g. a tape drive and tapes)
It is not usually a straightforward or simple task.
A FULL restore process is a pain without a Bare metal restore process.
How can we over come these issues to make backups a bit more palatable?
The time consuming aspect and media feeding are definitely a real problem but can be over come with a large cheap disk to dump your backups to allow all the backup data to be written completely before having to then write to the backup media.
You can't get around this problem but using the approach above you can delay the feeding until the end of the process.
Expensive backup devices and media can be addressed with a large cheap disk, software data compression, and CD-R/DVD-R technologies. CD-R's are VERY cheap. You can get quality 700MB CD-Rs for under 40 cents. That's less than .0005 cents a MB!
This problem can be overcome with a user friendly tool.
The recover tool must capable of doing a bare metal backup and restore.
The cool pick of the day is aimed at the Linux Crowd today... Mondo Rescue- a bare metal backup/recovery solution.
Mondo Rescue is a open source backup program for use on Linux systems. It can be found at http://www.mondorescue.org/ Their documentation can be found at http://www.mondorescue.org/docs.shtml
Mondo allows you to back up you computer to a tape drive, CD-R[W], DVD-R[W] NFS disk, or an ISO image. How Mondo accomplishes this is by creating a clone (total snap shot) of the system data (such as the boot loader, disk partition information) and user data. When the time comes to do a restore, you boot off a rescue disk and feed all the Mondo rescue images (mondorescue-#.iso). This is accomplished either by hand in the case of CD-R[W]s or point it to the images on the NFS shared disk, or tape device, etc. Mondo supports many filesystems such as LVM 1/2, RAID, ext2, ext3, JFS, XFS, ReiserFS, VFAT, and according to their website additional filesystems can easily be added- all you need to do is e-mail the mailing list with your request.
Mondo is free of charge! It has been published under the GPL v2 (GNU Public License version 2).
Mondo supports right “out of the box” the following Linux distro's
RedHat 7.3 and 9
Fedora 4 and 5
RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4
OpenSuSE 9.3 and 10
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9
Debian 3.1
Mandriva 10.1 10.2 and 2006.0
Get all the images
Since I use Red Hat AS 4, I went to ftp://ftp.mondorescue.org/rhel/4/
and downloaded: (use the wget commands listed below or click the ftp:// links of the rpms)
wget ftp://ftp.mondorescue.org/rhel/4/afio-2.4.7-1.i586.rpm
wget ftp://ftp.mondorescue.org/rhel/4/buffer-1.19-1.i386.rpm
wget ftp://ftp.mondorescue.org/rhel/4/mindi-1.0.7-460.rhel4.i386.rpm
wget ftp://ftp.mondorescue.org/rhel/4/mondo-2.0.7-454.rhel4.i386.rpm
Installation and setup
Installation is a snap if you use one of the supported Linux Distributions mentioned above. For me since I have RHAS4:
rpm -i afio-2.4.7-1.i586.rpm
rpm -i buffer-1.19-1.i386.rpm
rpm -i mindi-1.0.7-460.rhel4.i386.rpm
rpm -i mondo-2.0.7-454.rhel4.i386.rpm
If you dont have one of the mentioned Linux Distributions, you can download and compile the tar.gz file, tar zxf the files and configure, make, make install.
Any of the above Distributions should have all the tools necessary to support all of Mondo's system requirements but if you don't have an officially supported Distribution, you should check that you have the following packages installed: afio, bzip2, cdrtools/cdrecord/growisofs, ncurses, newt, isolinux/syslinux, lzo (optional), lzop (optional), mkisofs, and slang.
The Install Process
Bare Metal Backup and Restore (Part 1) - This article
The Backup Process
Bare Metal Backup and Restore (Part 2)
The Restore Process
Bare Metal Backup and Restore (Part 3)
