CentOS - Nov 2020 - Best practice preparing for disk restoring system

I'd agree with you John.  I'm trying to get away from Amanda's 
unpredictability and go back to using scripts to drive dump (for 
ext2/3/4) and xfsdump (for xfs).

Is there any easy way to tell rear to include xfsdump and dump 
capability?  If the commands are there then its trivial to restore data.

What I've done in the past is before the nightly backup write a small 
file to the root of each filesystem giving disk geometries.  You can 
then use any recovery DVD to partition and reload the OS.  If rear can 
do this for me it would be __much__ neater!

On 18/11/2020 08:24, John Pierce wrote:
> I'm old school, but I always liked using dump/restore on unix file
> systems.  e2dump or whatever for linux, zfs send/recieve for zfs, ufsdump
> on freebsd ufs, etc etc.
> 
> then I just need to know what file systems they are, and where they should
> be mounted, and its trivial to set tha tup on new hardware.
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> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
> 
-- 
J Martin Rushton MBCS

> What I've done in the past is before the nightly backup write a small
> file to the root of each filesystem giving disk geometries.? You can
> then use any recovery DVD to partition and reload the OS.? If rear can
> do this for me it would be __much__ neater!
According to rear webpage: https://relax-and-recover.org/about/

Extensive disk layout implementation, incl.

  * HWRAID (HP SmartArray)
  * SWRAID
  * LVM
  * multipathing
  * DRBD
  * iSCSI
  * LUKS (encrypted partitions and filesystems)

I personally used rear to restore lvm volume groups and several logical
volumes with success.

I will test a more complicated layout until the end of this year and can
let you know about the findings.

Regards,

Felix

Thanks for that.  I only picked up on rear this morning, I suppose if 
you don't go looking for it you'll never find it.  A combination of the 
paper Site Management Guide and the nightly disk summary have worked for 
over 20 years on *NIX!  VMS before that was totally different, but we 
still kept paper copies of configuration.

On 18/11/2020 12:47, Felix K?lzow wrote:
>> What I've done in the past is before the nightly backup write a
small
>> file to the root of each filesystem giving disk geometries.? You can
>> then use any recovery DVD to partition and reload the OS.? If rear can
>> do this for me it would be __much__ neater!
> According to rear webpage: https://relax-and-recover.org/about/
> 
> Extensive disk layout implementation, incl.
> 
>  ?* HWRAID (HP SmartArray)
>  ?* SWRAID
>  ?* LVM
>  ?* multipathing
>  ?* DRBD
>  ?* iSCSI
>  ?* LUKS (encrypted partitions and filesystems)
> 
> I personally used rear to restore lvm volume groups and several logical
> volumes with success.
> 
> I will test a more complicated layout until the end of this year and can
> let you know about the findings.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Felix
> 
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
-- 
J Martin Rushton MBCS

> On Nov 18, 2020, at 3:27 AM, J Martin Rushton via CentOS <centos at
centos.org> wrote:
> 
> I'd agree with you John.  I'm trying to get away from Amanda's
unpredictability and go back to using scripts to drive dump (for ext2/3/4) and
xfsdump (for xfs).
> 
There is enterprise class open source backup software worth mentioning: bareos
(and bacula which it forked from). I use them for over a decade, bacula first,
then I switched over to bareos. I back up using bareos UNIXes (FreeBSD), Linuxes
(CentOS), MS Windows.

Valeri
> Is there any easy way to tell rear to include xfsdump and dump capability? 
If the commands are there then its trivial to restore data.
> 
> What I've done in the past is before the nightly backup write a small
file to the root of each filesystem giving disk geometries.  You can then use
any recovery DVD to partition and reload the OS.  If rear can do this for me it
would be __much__ neater!
> 
> On 18/11/2020 08:24, John Pierce wrote:
>> I'm old school, but I always liked using dump/restore on unix file
>> systems.  e2dump or whatever for linux, zfs send/recieve for zfs,
ufsdump
>> on freebsd ufs, etc etc.
>> then I just need to know what file systems they are, and where they
should
>> be mounted, and its trivial to set tha tup on new hardware.
>> _______________________________________________
>> CentOS mailing list
>> CentOS at centos.org
>> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
> 
> -- 
> J Martin Rushton MBCS
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos