Linux Complete Backup and Recovery HOWTO

Charles Curley

<charlescurley at charlescurley dot com>

Revision History
Revision 1.6	2004-04-29	Revised by: c^2
Added Knoppix notes, Syslinux, PPART, QtParted, some other rescue CDs, and made some fixes.
Revision 1.5	2003-12-19	Revised by: c^2
Fedora and GRUB notes.
Revision 1.4	2003-08-17	Revised by: c^2
Some notes on burning CD-ROMs, and more on files to exclude.
Revision 1.3	2003-04-24	Revised by: c^2
Substituted new email address and URL for old.
Revision 1.2	2003-02-12	Revised by: c^2
Added Red Hat 8.0 notes, support for FAT32, split the first stage restore scripts, and other minor changes. Notes on Amanda.
Revision 1.1	2002-09-10	Revised by: c^2
New code to handle ext3 partitions in `make.fdisk`, and a note on `initrd`.
Revision 1.0	2002-07-24	Revised by: c^2
We now use bz2 compression in the first stage, have the run time option to check for bad blocks, and have a script that runs the entire first stage.

Imagine your disk drive has just become a very expensive hockey puck. Imagine you have had a fire, and your computer case now looks like something Salvador Dalĩ would like to paint. Now what?

Total restore, sometimes called bare metal recovery, is the process of rebuilding a computer after a catastrophic failure. In order to make a total restoration, you must have complete backups, not only of your file system, but of partition information and other data. This HOWTO is a step-by-step tutorial on how to back up a Linux computer so as to be able to make a bare metal recovery, and how to make that bare metal recovery. It includes some related scripts.