Are there any instructions available for how to do a full bare metal
restore onto a physical server? I've got a process down for restoring VMs, but
that's easy, because I can just make a new virtual hard drive and then move the
whole thing onto my virtual hosts. I've got a process set up to record
information about the underlying file systems and hard drive layout, but I have
no idea how to take a blank machine and restore onto it.
Is the general idea that you'd do an OS install, and an Amanda client
install, and then run amrecover from / ?
-Sandro
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Alan Hodgson
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2017 9:33 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Backing up the backup server
On Wednesday 04 January 2017 15:29:37 Ochressandro Rettinger wrote:
> The ultimate goal of all of this backing up, for us,
> is in case there's some sort of catastrophic failure. Like, the
> server room burns down. But if that happened, the machine that's
> making the tapes would be lost as well. Which means that with my very
> limited knowledge of Amanda, I don't know how to recover from a tape
> without the Amanda server that created it.
>
> If I were to copy /var/lib/amanda and /etc/amanda to
> some other remote system, is that enough to reconstruct the tape logs
> (for lack of a better term) and configuration that would be needed to
> perform recoveries? Obviously I'd need to install Amanda on the
> replacement server, but if I had those files, would that let Amanda
> think that it was the system that had created those tapes, at least
> enough to read them? Is there a better way to do this?
>
/etc/amanda, and wherever the amanda db files are (the infofile, logdir,
indexdir, and tapelist settings from amanda.conf)
You should also have copies of any encryption keys used.
I would also recommend you have details on each client regarding at least
drives sizes and partitioning, RAID setups, filesystem sizes and layouts, LVM
configuration, etc, things you'll need to prep on them before restoring any
data. Also, where you can find the latest database backups, and other stuff
that amanda can't backup live, and how to restore those.
Technically,you don't need the amanda config, the files can be extracted from
the tapes for a bare-metal restore without needing the index files.
You should document and practice your restoration process, for at least the
amanda server and one full client machine of each type, to ensure it works.
Full restores are a pain, honestly, testing the process before you need it
makes panic time less stressful.
