[ale] Fingers crossed, bare iron restore

[BruceG]

Hey all,

   I've been asking the list about backups and restores for quite a while, and 
finally tried it out on my desktop. My desktop is dual boot. It runs Windows 
ME on a 6 gig disk (/dev/hda) and SuSE 9.0 Pro on a 40 gig disk (/dev/hdb). 
hdb1 is swap and hdb2 is tons 'o fun. Googling got me to Hugo Rabson and 
Mondo Rescue.

   I went to http://www.mondorescue.org and downloaded Mondo and Mindi RPMs 
for SuSE 9.0 The development version has more day-to-day work going on, and 
seems to have good support in the mailing list, so I installed the 
development version.

   The site gives a good list of prerequisites. SuSE 9.0 was pretty good. I 
did have to go here: http://www.mikenjane.net/~mike/  for notes on running 
mondo on the SuSE platform. I also had to download a "fixed" newt RPM and 
make a symlink (documented on the website).

   After installing, I ran mondoarchive and backed up my dual-boot system to 
tape. You have an option to leave specific directories out of the backup, or 
to backup only specific directories. My work laptop runs Win2K and I backed 
it up (8.2 gigs) to a Samba share on my SuSE desktop. I decided not to back 
that up to tape (hoping to not lose both my desktop and my laptop at the same 
time. I may buy another tape to cover it, but work does the OS and 
application installs on fried laptops, so I may just back up my user data).

   I selected to do a complete backup, with the exception of /home/bgriffis/
Backups (my thinkpad stuff). A quick 8 hours later, I had a tape. Oh - 
another thing: my desktop is only a PII 266 w/ 384Meg of RAM. It might have 
been quicker with more CPU. Mondo was taking a good 70% of my CPU, and I was 
pretty much maxed out. Mondorescue did not pick up my tapes mount point, but 
gives you the option of telling it where it is. I just filled in "/dev/ht0" 
to tell Mondo where the tapedrive was. I felt like I was back in Computer 
Operator land of years gone by (I'm sure a great many of you have done time 
in the tape library!).

   Mondo writes out an image file, /root/images/mindi.iso.  This is an image 
of YOUR current running system, YOUR kernel, and YOUR modules. My desktop 
doesn't have a CD burner, so I copied it to my son's Toshiba laptop and 
burned it to CD. Mondo also writes out a boot, a root and several data floppy 
images. I could not boot from the floppy boot image, but it could have been a 
faulty floppy disk. I didn't chase it down.

   I booted my PC using the mindi.iso CD. I entered mondorestore to get the 
gui screen, and selected a partial restore. I restored my home directory to 
make sure it worked. Success!!

   Now for the scary part. A few days after I decided to do a "nuke." That 
checks your partitions, formats your drives (wipes everything!!!) and 
restores. You can change your filesystem if you select expert restore. I'm no 
expert, so just went with a "nuke."

   All sorts of scary warnings came up, I held my breath, crossed my fingers 
and hit enter (with said crossed fingers). I was able to restore from tape! I 
booted the PC, and got an error message "unable to boot, insert floppy, ... - 
your standard hosed MBR message. I booted from my WinME rescue floppy (make 
sure to make rescue floppies BEFORE nuking!!!) and did a "sys c:" to restore 
the MBR.

   Mondo also had problems with grub, or I possibly hosed that part as well. 
Mondo has an option to restore grub, and I tentatively typed away the 
following magical commands:
	bash: mount-me
	bash: chroot /mnt/RESTORING
	bash: grub-install '(hd0)'
	bash: exit
	bash: unmount-me

	Those fingers got crossed one more time for good luck, and I rebooted. My 
grub option list came up, and I booted into Windows to make sure the kid's 
games still worked. Success!!! I then rebooted, and went into Linux. SuSE 9.0 
Pro came up, looking just like it did when I started the backup Friday night. 
Samba was working, files were where I thought they should be. Everything just 
simply worked.

	I know on the list we discussed tape versus disk versus CD. I'm backing up 
about 6 gigs, and a WHOLE lot more if I decide to include my laptop image and 
my wife's laptop image. I decided to go with tape for now, as it is better 
than no backups at all (I've been there way too many times). Mondo does 
support backup/restore from CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, Tape, NFS, and disk 
(hmmm. USB 2.0 attached disk sounds like a good option!). As my budget 
improves, I'll probably opt for a hefty external disk drive. 

	For dual-boot people, the Win9X worked fine (well, except I messed up 
somewhere and had to do the "sys c:" thing). I can't say anything about NTFS 
and Win2K / WinXP support. I haven't tried it.

	Notes: read the Mondo manuals for both 1.6 and 1.7. Read the mondo HTML guide 
(that has a LOT of information) BEFORE restoring. (I read AFTER restoring). 
Subscribe to the mailing list. There are people using it on lots of different 
distributions - but it pays to check first.

	Part one of the backup question is working. Now to figure out what to do with 
my laptops. Hmmm, go dual-boot and use Mondorescue's NFS option? For now I'll 
just back up specific directories while I watch how the NTFS folks make out.
Bruce