Greetings,

Well, Christmas is out of the way and now we are back at work (-:

Anyone here ever done a bare-metal restore on a Linux server? We have this one only only server that I think it's going to die someday, meaning hardware not the great Linux OS. Besides, the daily backup that we do, I am not certain that will be enough to get this server back online if it ever goes down.

So, I've been collectively reading and poking my friend "Google" for some details about bare-metal restore for dissaster recovery purpose. I found Acronis software talked about this particuluar product by restoring from the bare-metal restore to another totally different hardware and even the name of the manufacture without much of a downtime.

Therefore, I thought this is kind of interesting and see if anyone here in this forum has done this or know of a better software for this purpose.

My server Specs:

4 x 3.0GHz Intel Xeon
8GB RAM
10/100/1000 GBit NIC
Linux RHAS 4.0 - x86_64 GNU/Linux 2.6.9-22.ELsmp


Thank you in advance for your feedback.

There are a few products that can do a bare metal restore, but in the past I've had great luck simply using rsync from the backups as long as you're remaining on the same Linux distribution. Install base operating system on new server, rsync files from backup over new system. You need to exclude some specific files in the /etc directory (modules.conf and such) but even with a change of hardware things work very well. There are few cases that necessitate a bare metal restore in my experience that can't be better and faster using other methods.