A general rsync question -> bare-metal restore

[Bogart Salzberg]

Thanks, Jim.

I am planning to pull the daily snapshot from the data center to my  
office with rsync (via dirvish). The USB drive would be hooked up to  
my development box here in the office. Then if I ever needed a bare- 
metal restore I could use a Mondo DVD for the OS and then mount the  
USB drive to restore files. The SC1435's at the data center have DVD- 
ROM and USB 2.0 standard.

I was also vaguely considering mirroring the whole 250GB to a spare  
hard drive at the office. Then I could just drop it in to restore.  
The challenge would be ensuring the mirror remains in a known-good  
state. Also it would take two hours to re-sync the RAID, which  
doesn't offer a compelling advantage time-wise.

Anybody else have any brilliant ideas for bare-metal restore?

Bogart

On Nov 29, 2007, at 10:05 AM, Jim Nelson wrote:

> Bogart Salzberg wrote:
>> I was also wondering about rsync-ing to a USB drive. For a  
>> "snapshot"  archive that uses hard links for unchanged files (like  
>> dirvish), is  it necessary to format the USB drive as ext2, ext3  
>> or some other Unix  FS flavor? I imagine that it is. If so, will  
>> "make2fs -j /dev/<usb  drive>" work as expected?
>> Thanks,
>> Bogart
>
> Yes on both counts.
>
> It looks like dervish works about the same as our in-house backup  
> system, and I did the development of it on a USB drive and a  
> laptop.  You will need ext3 or xfs - depending on the size of the  
> drive - xfs is very fast with large-capacity drives.  However, it  
> is not supported by the RHEL/CentOS "rescue" mode, so if you're  
> planning on bare-metal restores, you'll have to use ext3.
>
> P. S. - if you're really planning on using a USB drive with the  
> server and you've got a PCI slot free, a USB 2.0 card will save you  
> a lot of hassle and time.
>
>> On Nov 28, 2007, at 4:47 PM, Jim Nelson wrote:
>>> John Bown wrote:
>>>> Good afternoon everyone.  I have a PowerEdge 1600SC running  
>>>> SLES9  SP3.
>>>> Do any of you know if it's possible to rsync said box directly  
>>>> to an
>>>> external USB2 hard drive?  Many thanks.
>>>>
>>>> John Bown
>>>>
>>> Yes.  Barring things like /proc, it'll work just fine.  The  
>>> SC1600  does not have
>>> USB 2.0, though, so it'll take forever and a day...
>>>
>>> I tend to do NFS export/gigabit switch/laptop with USB 2.0 for   
>>> those occasions.
>>>
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