Best practice: Bare metal restore ??? 1

[madmurdock]

Hi all,

as I am relatively new to the linux theme, I want to know, what is the best method to do a bare metal restore with SLES V9 on a Power5 IBM-maschine. There are a few alternatives, and I need a little bit help for my decision:

1) Script_based: Creating an immage with dd and writing a boot block in not very difficult, but maybe nonsense cause of other tools?

2) Creating Images by software (acronis for example.)
3) Have the whole restored by software like "Storix". anybody knows that and can give me a experience report?

Thanx a lot

mad_murdock

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[QatQat]

dd is versatile but it has a file limit to 2 Gb, so not very useful for what you want to do.

If you have a commercial disk ghosting application then it is quick and wasy otherwise, I do not know whether it is the bext practice, but for me tar works fine.

Here is a easy tutorial.

http://servers.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/02/16/1922228

QatQat

Life is what happens when you are making other plans.

 

[madmurdock]

Thanks QatQat for that link. After reading I found that K.O.-Crit, that I have to install a mini-Linux first and then overwrite my backup...

Anyway, thanks for that. Any other suggestions? What is about <i>SystemRescueCD</i> ? Any experience with that?

mad

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[LawnBoy]

I use Acronis.

 

[QatQat]

Hi madmurdock,

systemrescuecd is a self booting cd full of apps that may be more useful in case of a unbootable machine, windoz and linux, in order to allow you to get your data out.
Anyway, in SystemRescueCD you may find some ghosting applications.
I normally use Hiren's Boot CD, although, I admit, it is completely illegal in terms of licenses of software included.

Cheers
QatQat

Life is what happens when you are making other plans.

 

[madmurdock]

@Lawnboy: Thanks for that short comment. if I remember properly, you must first boot from a Acronis CD to backup and boot from it to restore. What I would like to have is an offline backup on a running machine and a boot CD for restore.

In the meantime I have an evaluation copy from storix, which I will test it on two different Power5 LPARs.

@QatQat, thanks again, but as it is for a legal customer, lets stick to legal software ;-)

mad

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[itsp1965]

Madmurdock since you are using a Power5 can I assume you are running TSM also? If this is the case you may want to consider Christie Bare Metal Recovery (CBMR) which works in conjunction with TSM to perform bare metal restores (

http://www.cristie.co.uk).

Hope this helps.

 

[plamb]

I use SYSBACK by STORIX

 

[madmurdock]

Thanx, itsp1965, for this very valuable information about CBMR and a star for you.

@plamb: Thk you also, and what is your experience wit that, does it work properly or not?

mad

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