On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 10:14:17AM +0200, Beorn Harris wrote:

> Thanks for the detailed reply...  I recognize that I could use
> knoppix (or other) to do the recovery as you mentioned...I was just
> hoping to be able to make the cd for that system easily without
> mucking around too much.

Personally, I would prefer a generic live CD over a custom bacula
rescue CD even if the bacula rescue CD were working perfectly during
the test.  The custom bacula rescue CD places a burden on you to
generate one for each system and to keep it up-to-date.  IMHO, this is
a problem.

Scenario:

* You test your bacula rescue CD.  It works flawlessly.

* Three months later, someone else does a kernel upgrade that adds all
  kinds of hardware support.  But you don't need to do a new bacula
  rescue CD because the old one will obviously still boot the system.

* Three months after that, the system motherboard fries.  Someone else
  replaces it.  The system boots fine, so no one worries about the
  backups.

* And another three months later, the system drive dies.  You boot
  your bacula rescue, and discover that the kernel it's running
  doesn't support the new motherboard's SATA chipset.  You don't have
  any of the old motherboard still around.  Oops!  Time to either make
  a mad scramble to build a new bacula rescue using a different
  system, or try a live CD, which you have never tested before.

Whether you use a live CD or a bacula rescue CD, you *should* test
your backup after each significant change.  But if a change happened
before the failure and you *didn't* test your backup, IMHO, a generic
live CD is more likely to actually boot your recovery system.  So
better to use a live CD to begin with.

- Morty

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