Hi,

I'm running RHEL 5.1 and would like a reliable method of backing up the OS files so that the system can be restored from the ground up i.e. a bare metal restore.

I am using LVM for the root volume group so the backup should contain information about the structure of the root volume group and files within this volume group. The backup would also contain the structure only of the other volume groups.

I am looking for a utility similar to mksysb (AIX), make_recovery (HPUX) or flar_create (Solaris)etc.

I know there is a plugin for Veritas Netbackup but we don't run this as Legato Networker is in use. Is there a way of inmaging the system so that it can be restored from a remote NFS server after booting a recovery kernel?

Any help appreciated, thanks.

This has been covered on here several times before. Take a look at systemimager, mondoarchive, or mkcdrec. I've had good luck with them in the past.

You might want to take a look at Mondo. This works pretty well as an initial restore for generic system setups. If you're wanting to do full backups on a regular basis, I don't think this is what you want. Just something that came to mind...

For bare-metal recovery for linux similar to mksysb or flar_create, you can look at Storix SBAdmin for Linux.

Their software was designed by the guy who wrote sysback for AIX. So it is very similar to the other tools you are comparing.

This thread is THREE YEARS OLD....and linking to a commercial, pay-for product on your second post smells a little like spam, but the link is interesting.