Linux Complete Backup and Recovery HOWTO

Charles Curley

<ccurley at trib dot com>

Revision History
Revision 1.2	2003-02-12	Revised by: c^2
Added Red Hat 8.0 notes, support for FAT32, split the first stage restore scripts, and other minor changes. Notes on Amanda.
Revision 1.1	2002-09-10	Revised by: c^2
New code to handle ext3 partitions in `make.fdisk`, and a note on `initrd`.
Revision 1.0	2002-07-24	Revised by: c^2
We now use bz2 compression in the first stage, have the run time option to check for bad blocks, and have a script that runs the entire first stage.
Revision 0.05	2002-07-04	Revised by: c^2
Added another variation, other minor fixes.
Revision 0.04	2002-05-09	Revised by: c^2
Added Theme & Variations section, a variation; also some minor reorganization.
Revision 0.03	2002-04-09	Revised by: c^2
Added the Beeblebrox Project to resources.
Revision 0.02	2002-01-27	Revised by: c^2
Added Mondo to resources
Revision 0.01	2001-10-25	Revised by: c^2
Initial version for LDP release

Imagine your disk drive has just become a very expensive hockey puck. Imagine you have had a fire, and your computer case now looks like something Salvador Dalĩ would like to paint. Now what?

Total restore, sometimes called bare metal recovery, is the process of rebuilding a computer after a catastrophic failure. In order to make a total restoration, you must have complete backups, not only of your file system, but of partition information and other data. This HOWTO is a step-by-step tutorial on how to back up a Linux computer so as to be able to make a bare metal recovery, and how to make that bare metal recovery. It includes some related scripts.