Hi,

I work for a small company who has one root server in a server farm that I manage. The server runs a standard postfix setup with mysql for user lookups. I am confident in this area and have prior knowledge of working in simular enviroments.

The one thing I find my knowledge lacks is backuping up data in Linux. I currently use the backup feature in Webmin but I find this feature very lacking so I was hopeing someone here could shed some light on various backup solutions which fit my companies need.

Basically my bosses are worried about me getting hit by a bus or me leaving the company etc. They therefore want a backup solution which has a web interface to control it that anyone technical can use (not necessarly a Linux technician).

The most critical backup is the full system backup of the actual server. The user data is already backuped by webmin which at the moment does an OK job.

I basically need a solution where a user can just choose a date and then choose full system restore which will restore litterally everything from that specified date.

Our server is running Fedora 6 and we have a FTP server to which we can place all our backups onto.


Thanks!

I'm sure you know Fedora 6 is ancient, and should be upgraded.....that being said, I'd check out systemimager, mondoarchive, and mkcdrec. They take system 'snapshots', and put together recovery images that make a bare-metal restore fairly painless.

If you're going to dissimilar hardware, though, it gets tricky. The best suggestion I could make, is to set up your server with the OS on one drive/partition, and everything else on another (all your installed software, custom scripts, configs, etc.) The chances of losing both drives/arrays at the same time is slim. If you lose the OS, you can throw a base install on it in a few minutes, even to different hardware. Re-mount the 'software' drive/partition, and you're back in business. Lost the 'software' drive? You can easily script a copy job to tar/zip everything to a different server nightly, and just copy the data back, or use rsync to keep things up to date.

It's a low-tech/low-cost solution. There are enterprise backup solutions that address all of this, but they're $$$. You get what you pay for, though.

Thank you very much. I will look into these solutions. Unfortuantly the server only has one set of disk which run a RAID 1 array at the moment.


Best Regards

Fredrik