Disaster Recovery Suggestions
 

Anyone have good suggestions suggestions to use for a disaster recovery program for slackware servers (non xwindows)? I havent been able to find anything that would work on a command line.

What kind of recovery?Something to boot up with tools so you can fix something or somekind of backup type script?

Re: Disaster Recovery Suggestions
 

Slackware 9.1's Disk 2 was a live CD that started you with BASH. I'm not sure what disk it is for Slack10.0, though, might be 2, maybe 3 or 4. But either way, that should be able to let you get yourself back on your feet.

I'm not sure how you are defining disaster recovery, because the key features of a carefully designed and well thought out disaster recovery plan will essentially be the same regardless of the OS. Additionally, the implied idea in your post that a disaster recovery effort could be launched from the command line is pretty confusing -- it's not exactly like typing in a couple of commands via the CLI will restore everything to its previous state if your data center has been affected by a disaster such as an earthquake, fire, or tornado.

Generally, a thorough disaster recovery plan involves making and retaining a set of system backups on a continual basis; designating an alternative location where the system can be restored to and run from should your primary site be unusable; a group of personnel with defined duties and roles who have been trained on what needs to be done to achieve a system recovery; a plan for acquiring, installing, and configuring all production hardware and software systems; a communication plan to notify your users, employees, and customers regarding the condition of your system, and many, many other things. Basically it would be way too much to attempt to cover in a few posts here at LQ.

Disaster recovery planning is a huge topic. I'd recommend doing a Google search on it, or to check Amazon for book suggestions about it. Good luck with it. -- J.W.

Sorry for the broad question. I meant a backup type program. I know I could just put my /etc dir on a cd or whatnot but I was kinda wondering if anyone had any suggestions on a program to make it easier.

Can't you tarball the directories that are important, and then have the files burnt onto CD's or DVD's, or even better yet, have a backup partition, so if you have to reformat your system, you can leave the backup files untouched and still on your hard drive?

Ya, write a short script to periodically back up what you want and crontab it.

Hey kemplej this program is non xwindows and wicked if you just want to backup the whole partition... I use it on my system as it only takes about 6 minutes to restore my whole about 2gb slackware partition :) (Which I keep on another backup partition)

Try rdiff-backup:

http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu/

From the man page:

Description
rdiff-backup is a script, written in python(1) that backs up one directory to another. The target directory ends up a copy (mirror) of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago. The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup. rdiff-backup also preserves symlinks, special files, hardlinks, permissions, uid/gid ownership, and modification times.

rdiff-backup can also operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a pipe, like rsync(1). Thus you can use ssh and rdiff-backup to securely back a hard drive up to a remote location, and only the differences will be transmitted. Using the default settings, rdiff-backup requires that the remote system accept ssh connections, and that rdiff-backup is installed in the user's PATH on the remote system. For information on other options, see the section on REMOTE OPERATION.