hi

i'm using FC5 with /home on a LVM volume group spread across 2x 200GB SATA drives

/boot, /var, /swap and / all sit on their own 'conventional' partitions on one of the drives - the /home VG spans the remainder of this drive and all of the second

this box - which is experimental at the moment - will end up a home fileserver for a bunch of XP boxes

there will be backup of /home to external drives on a nightly basis (rsnapshot as a cron job)

so here's the question ....... if one of my drives goes down i need to recover the system state (including all the various tweaks and additional soft i've added) and then i can simply restore /home from the external drives - right ?

but what do i need to have a copy of such that i can reload FC5 from the DVD then copy my system state from wherever it's stored and then be back to where i was before it all fell over ?

and a follow-on from that - if i have a system state backup which was done with a given partition plan, can i restore that to a different plan ?

thanks

neill


ps: i've been playing with mondo and various LVM arrangements and am yet to get a nuke restore as it seems mondo has trouble recreating the LVM partitions and i'm not entirely sure i have the expertise to do that manually - the tools are in mondo though

well, a surefire way to backup everything is to make a disk image of both disks, then all that is needed for recovery is to restore the image... you could probably make a image of the drives after a fresh install with everything tweaked, but with none of the data in /home. Then if the whole thing dies, you restore that image first, then restore the data from the external disks.

how do i make an image as you suggest ??

something i've done in windoze but not here

neill

whatever i do i can't get mondo to work for me - something to do with LVM i think

see the learn the dd command thread in LQ
Some other tools may be available

I backup /etc, /var and /home. I don't think backing up /usr is really necessary, software can easily be reinstalled. Redoing all my configs for everything, well I've done that before and it's not fun at all!