Backup Recovery of a disk failure

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I have installed RHEL 6.6 for 64 bit workstation, along with a bunch of libraries that were required for our scientific programs, and would like to know what other RHEL users recommend for a backup and recovery software to work with an external recovery hard drive. I have found three after an internet search: Acronis Total Image, Storix SBAdmin and Symantec Backup. We have used Acronis in the past but it was a bit clumsy to use.

Any comments?

Responses

You need to provide more information. For starters: is this workstation the one and only system you're looking for backup and restore capabilities for? If not, do you already have a backup and restore solution for the rest of the systems in your shop?

  • if you're only going to be backing up this one system, setting up and maintaining a scalable backup and recovery product may be more effort than it's worth
  • if you've got other assets your operation is providing backup and recovery services to, why wouldn't you extend that solution to your Red Hat system?

This is a standalone linux workstation in our Windows environment. I take it to field locations for test analysis and will be in remote settings unable to access our server back in the office. The platform is a Dell M6800 Workstation laptop, i7 core, RHEL 6.6_64-bit. It is important that I have a backup / recovery solution that is completely portable.

How frequently are you able to dock it?

A dead-easy solution is to simply attach a jump-drive to the system, then use LVM to mirror the workstation's internal drive(s) to an external drive each time you return "home". If you ever find that your system's drive dies while you're in the field, you can then attach the jump drive and use it as the boot drive. You can replace the dead drive and mirror from the external back to the replacement.

Similarly, if the laptop became a total loss, you could simply attach the jump drive to a new system and "restore" from the jump drive in a similar fashion to how you'd do if you were only replacing a failed internal drive.

Thank you for the LVM suggestion. I am all about an easy solution.

I am looking for two types of Backup techniques for my RHEl 5 Workstation.

Firstly I want to take regular snapshots (checkpoints every few days) so that if something goes awry, I can do a simple 'restore' and get back on my feet.

Secondly, I am looking to download some back/restore software which can back up my entire hard disk safely. I am looking for some solution other than using a "jump" or "piggy-back" drive.

Any suggestions Please. Many Thanks !! :)

There are many native linux commands/tools available for this purpose such as 'dd, tar, rsync, dump' etc., I'd prefer to use 'dump & restore' if there is a need to perform application backup and restore. In case of taking system backup which would serve as disaster recovery data then I'd use 'ReaR' to chive this. The 'ReaR' package is now available nationally for users.

How to backup and restore a whole Red Hat Enterprise Linux system with the dump/restore commands?

What is Relax and Recover(ReaR) and how can I use it for disaster recovery?

Hi Sadashiva, I am interested in taking incremental backups at the end of the day. There were times when I lost data due to some nasty crash... etc.

So I guess dump/restore is cool for entire Partition backup and recovery. Shall also read up on reaR.

Yes, ReaR is an open-source industry standard and one of the best approaches of bare metal recovery. But choice would depend on individual organizations and as per their requirements/needs.

Hi Pervez,

I recommend to use Clonezilla for creating and restoring system (disk and partition) backups.
The performance of this reliable tool is great, I'm using it for years and it never let me down. :)

Regards,
Christian

Hi Christian,

So do you use it as a disaster recovery system? It seems to be similar to Acronis? Am I making sense? I once lost my partition for some reason and Acronis did nothing to restore it :)

So Clonezilla live seems to be a suitable option. Please do provide more suggestions in terms of incremental backups.

Many Thanks :)

Hi Pervez,

You're welcome ! :) Yes, Clonezilla is my disaster recovery system of choice and yes, it is similar to Acronis. But it is not a complete backup solution, the main focus is to backup and restore disks and/or partitions. For data backup tasks I recommend to use other tools - e.g. dirdiff or rsync.

Me personally, I prefer dirdiff, because of the ease of use. You can download the dirdiff .rpm file from the openSUSE software repositories and install it manually, select the version from openSUSE Leap.

https://software.opensuse.org/package/dirdiff

Regards,
Christian

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