[ale] Why Dual-Booting Sucks ...

[JD]

On 10/17/2014 11:13 AM, Paul Cartwright wrote:
>  I also do clonezilla images, and have restored one using that , like
> when I moved linux "/" to /dev/sdb1 .
> I do daily  fsa backups & rsyncs from sda to sdb & vice versa.. so if 1
> drive fails, I have a backup on the other. except for windows.. I should
> do a clonezilla for windows.. hmm...

For Linux backups, I just backup the list of packages, selected other settings
(/usr/local/, crontabs, /etc, ... ) and all data daily. Any DBs are dumped
before the backup starts.  Building a new base VM takes about 12 min, then
restore the data back where it was and tell the system to install (using a local
apt-cache server) all the packages takes about 15 min more.  That's it.

Creating an image is hands on, takes at least 30min per box and requires booting
off some other media.
My backups run over night (1-3 min per box), unattended, and can be restored
onto a freshly installed VM in 30-45 min. Plus 60-120 days of backups are much,
much, much smaller than any single image.  For my non-regulated systems, this is
the best of all worlds.

There is a place for backup-everything in many businesses, just not mine.