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Yesterday Bare Metal Backup and Restore (Part 2) covered installation of Mondo Rescue, an open source backup program for use on Linux systems. It can be found at http://www.mondorescue.org/ and their documentation can be found at http://www.mondorescue.org/docs.shtml

Today we cover, restoring from a backup with Mondo Rescue...

Restoring from Backup

Restoring with Mondo is an easy process. I will just be covering the CD restore process in this article. In future articles I may discuss the other options such as Network restore, etc. but for now, I will stick with the CD media. Make sure your BIOS is set to boot from CDRom and then simply boot from the first mondorescue CD that you created from the ISO images created during the Backup Process and CD burn.

After the CDRom boots, it will present you with a boot: prompt and you can choose a few options with a few parameters. The Main options are Interactive, Nuke, Compare or Expert. Only Interactive is going to be covered here but Nuke is pretty straightforward- it will wipe out everything and restore the system to the state it was at the time of the mondoarchive. With the Interactive, you can change some of the recovery processes such as the mount table, etc. It also presents you with options for network recovery, etc.

Also, when using the mondorescue CD's to restore a system image of a machine which was NOT even the same type of system, the interactive mode allows you to make adjustments to the mount table, etc to custom fit the restore onto the target machine. I used it to restore an image from Dell with 60GB hard disk to a Sony Vaio PCV-PC470DS with a 36GB hard disk. It restored fine. And Linux reconfigured all the devices upon boot. NOW THAT'S COOL!

Compare is a nice option. It allows you to compare your existing system against the snap shot images in the mondorescue CD set.

Expert mode is like what I accomplished in Interactive Mode with the Shift-Left Arrow trick. The Expert mode boots into a shell prompt and allows you to make changes using fdisk, e2label, etc. You can also use the mondorestore command while in this mode that will give you the mount list editor. The expert mode is truly for Linux savvy people.

There are 3 additional sub-options: donteject, noresize, and textonly at the boot prompt. These sub-options tell mondorestore to not eject the CDRom automatically, not to have the mountlist be adjusted to use unallocated space, and use a text only interface instead of the Newt based GUI.

There are a few gotcha's that you should be aware of:

1. ALWAYS DO A VERIFY! Without a good rescue set you will be unable to recover your data completely.

2. When you do a restore, make sure you keep track of the partition information. You can get that information from the partition table information presented in the Interactive Mode. You may need to take down that information and use the command prompt (Pressing Shift-Left Arrow 3 times) and do a e2label to correct any unlabeled partitions.

Conclusion

Backing up your systems is such a necessary task for all people and Mondo really makes it possible for anyone to backup and restore a snap shot of their system. Using the other options and features of Mondo allows you to restore a complete system snap shot or particular file systems. It can support a reasonable amount of media choices as well.

It is also a really good way for small computer support companies or consultants to deploy and support customers who are not computer savvy. Just imagine trying to get your non-computer savvy friend to restore a Complete Home Computer Environment after a crash. By furnishing people with quick restore disks, they can be up and running in a short time.

The Install Process

Bare Metal Backup and Restore (Part 1)

The Backup Process

Bare Metal Backup and Restore (Part 2)

Restoring from Backup

Bare Metal Backup and Restore (Part 3) - This article

# posted by TheGuardian : 10:06 AM