[gtaSAGE-members] backup client

[Fraser Campbell]

Hi,

A quick tip regarding my most recent amanda experience ...

We had a client call us asking for help with restoring a machine in which the 
disk had completely died.  The machine had been backed up with amanda and 
thankfully the backups were good.  Still how to get the amanda images spread 
across multiple tapes onto the new drives with the least amount of fuss?  We 
were basically considering two options:

- minimal install of their redhat system (enough to get the amanda utilities)
- use a Linux rescue disk (such as tomsrtbt) and tar/dd/mt to get the os on
  the new disks.

The rescue disk approach would have required either a local tape drive or 
[rs]sh plus we would have had to figure out in advance which tapes had the 
full backups and which had the incrementals (about 5 partitions each with 
data spread over 3 or 4 tapes).

Thankfully before resorting to either of the above I booted up my Knoppix CD.  
Wouldn't you know it, they bundled the amanda utilities.

So with amamda/knoppix the restore procedure became:

- boot knoppix
- create, format and mount partitions on new drives (we talked them into
  software raid)
- run amrecover (or was it amrestore) to restore os and data
- install boot loader
- reboot, back into normal operation

The system was fully restored and operational within an hour.  amrecover made 
the job trivial ... put in tape03, press Y, put in tape01, press Y, etc.

For those who haven't heard of Knoppix it's a bootable compressed Linux CD 
with over 2GB of software on it.  It auto-detects most hardware and makes a 
great rescue system, or a fairly slow desktop/demo system. Can be downloaded 
from http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser@wehave.net>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Halton Hills, Ontario, Canada                             Debian GNU/Linux