On Wed, 27 Dec 2006, Kern Sibbald wrote: >> Is there any reason that it can't be on the tape and restored first up >> as part of the DR process? > > That would be having the cart before the horse. The snapshot of the hard disk > configuration is to be able to reconfigure a broken hard disk or configure a > replacement disk. Until you have a configured disk there is no way to do a > restore. This information must be on a floppy or a CDROM or you must > manually reconstruct it.
...Or restored from tape to a floppy or memdisk or USB disk, etc..... > A full disaster recovery plan from bare metal is *very* complex. I'm getting quite worried that for every single machine in our network which might be backed up by Bacula (there are over 200) I will have to create a customised CDrom. Kern, PLEASE consider using a Knoppix or Trinity or similar live system as the basis of the bare metal restore system. Most of these people will actively work with you to facilitate this. >> >>> 2. A copy of your current Bacula file daemon that can be run on >>> a rescue system (i.e. probably statically linked). >> >> For a 'client', you want the FD. For a 'server', do you have to have the >> director? Is there anything that bextract can't do that dir+fd+sd can? > > I think you need to read the Bacula disaster recovery chapter. You are > talking about a "complete" disaster recovery system, which is orders of > magnitude more complicated to do from bare metal than what I am trying to > accomplish as a first step in that process. Nonetheless, the system needs to be 100% bootstrappable. Consider the case of the Bacula server (Director and SD) itself falling over. I use RAID1 on the system and database disks for this very reason, but as you youself know, RAID is not safe against "rm -r" style errors (or physical system destruction - fire, earthquake, theft....) > My rescue CDROM will restore a client machine where the Director and SD > are up and running on one or more other machines. I've managed to do a restore without the rescue CDrom by simply loading up an appropriately configured bacula-fd-static on a Trinity Rescue Disk. After redoing the partitions, restore took approximately 25 minutes. The basic fact is that the standard Linux system rescue CDs(+) are designed to be able to read as many different filesystems as possible, handle LVM/Raid, etc and interact with as much hardware as possible - and they're regularly updated. All that's needed is to convince the authors to include appropriate bacula file daemons and as long as partitioning information is available(*) they would cover 99% of all cases (including restoral of most generally used non-Linux operating system filesystems and partition tables(**)) (+) most are x86 only, but Ubuntu live (at least) has a PPC version. There is a definite need for SPARC and Alpha rescue/live systems too. (*) Given your standard case of restoring a bacula client, this should be trivially obtainable from the Bacula server. (**) I'm sure BSD people will pop up and say they can do the same thing and I'd be surprised if they couldn't produce a rescue system. AB ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
