LinuxQuestions.org - disaster recovery steps

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disaster recovery steps

Can anybody tell me now I can create a ISO boot disk for my mandrake 9.1 webserver. I am fearful that I may loose my hard drive and I wont be able to restore my filesystems back. I would like to have a ISO image of my system so I can boot my machine up to restore all file systems back. I assume that I will need tar to do this. What could I do to prevent me from loading the entire system? I have 2 20 gb hard drives both IDE. Here is my thought. Here is my filesystem . I do full system backup each night.

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 3.9G 1.9G 1.9G 50% /
/dev/hda1 46M 11M 33M 25% /boot
/dev/hda6 9.7G 62M 9.7G 1% /home
/dev/hda7 3.8G 1.3G 2.3G 37% /var
/dev/hdb1 19G 1.2G 17G 7% /var/www

IF I lost a filesystem on my hdaX drive, I could swap out the drive and just restore my full backup tarfile to the new disk. Can you fill me in on what I need to do to insure that I don't do any further damage. What do I need to know about lilo and how can I get the boot cd created with the tar pgm so I can extract the data?
A step by step recovery procedure would be nice if somebody is willing to share ther thoughts.
Thank YOu,

"IF I lost a filesystem on my hdaX drive, I could swap out the drive and just restore my full backup tarfile to the new disk. Can you fill me in on what I need to do to insure that I don't do any further damage. What do I need to know about lilo and how can I get the boot cd created with the tar pgm so I can extract the data?"

The easiest way to create the boot CD is to use LifeBoat:

http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

When you boot a LifeBoat CD the CD is removable. So you do not need to put the tar backups on the bootable LifeBoat CD. You can restore by booting the LifeBoat CD, removing the LifeBoat CD, mounting the CD-RW with your backup tar files, and extracting the tar files to your hard drive.

-----------------------------
Steve Stites

Thanks, The problem is I don't have a LifeBoat CD to boot my linux box. And my backup is performed on DDS tapes. I just wanted to know how I can make a LIFEBOAT CD and include tar so I can restore my backup tape. What is the procedure to create a LifeBoat CD so I can at least boot up linux and use the tar utility to restore. "

To create a LifeBoat CD you download the LifeBoat script from the web site and untar it. Then you configure the script for your system and run it. The LifeBoat script will burn a bootable CD.

"What about lilo?"

LifeBoat uses isolinux for a bootloader, not lilo. You don't have to do anything to the LifeBoat isolinux. You do not have to do anything to your system lilo.

"Please tell me what you would do if you lost (lets say) the boot partition and were unable to boot the system. You have a full system backup but you can't use it because you don't have access to tar."

Once a week I make tar backups of my system. It takes 3 CD-RWs. So to restore /boot I would boot my LifeBoat CD and then remove the CD. The entire LifeBoat system is then resident in memory, including tar. At that point I would be running on a memory resident Linux system that depends on absolutely nothing from your hard drive based Linux system. I would mount my first backup CD-RW on my CD-RW drive. I would then mount the /boot partition. I would then untar the /boot tar backup file from the CD-RW into the mountpoint directory for the /boot partition. umount the CD, umount the /boot partition, remove the backup CD-RW and issue:
shutdown -r now
to reboot my system.

___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

OK good.. But I still need to know how I can get my hands on a LifeBoat CD. IS there a option on how to create one in mandrake 9.1 . Thanks for your input. I am closer to understanding the process but still I lack the recovery linux CD.

"OK good.. But I still need to know how I can get my hands on a LifeBoat CD. IS there a option on how to create one in mandrake 9.1 . Thanks for your input. I am closer to understanding the process but still I lack the recovery linux CD."

You build your own LifeBoat CD. You go to the LifeBoat web site:
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeB....home.page.html
and you download the LifeBoat script. You then follow the directions in the documentation found on the LifeBoat web site and in the LifeBoat tarball to create your own version of a LifeBoat CD.

___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites