Re: [BackupPC-users] Hot Imaging Tool and BackupPC

Vince Tingey wrote at about 09:58:39 -0800 on Monday, November 23, 2009:
 > Hello Everyone,
 > 
 > We have been using BackupPC for about 2 years now and its great for 
 > doing file level backups!  However for doing a bare metal restore we had 
 > to first restore from an offline system image of various age then 
 > restore files from the BackupPC server. 
 > 
 > Recently we found a free tool for linux system hot backups offered from 
 > R1Soft.  http://www.r1soft.com/tools/linux-hot-copy/
 > 
 > It looks like we could use this tool with BackupPC to always have an 
 > up-to-date bare metal image to restore.  The downside being losing the 
 > ability to restore individual files from BackupPC unless we also keep a 
 > backup of the files in addition to the image file.  This doesn't seem 
 > too bad though as disk space is pretty cheap and we don't have a ton of 
 > servers.  I'm also wondering if the storage pooling built into BackupPC 
 > would work on the block level image files create by the Linux Hot Copy 
 > tool to reduce the storage space needed.

Looks interesting - here are my 2 cents
1. First, it's free (or at least the latest Beta is) but no guarantee
   for the future and it's certainly not Open Source

2. I'm not sure what you mean by:
   "The downside being losing the ability to restore individual files
   from BackupPC unless we also keep a backup of the files in addition
   to the image file."

   Why would you need to keep the image file? (which according to the
   FAQ doesn't survive a reboot).

   Instead, wouldn't you use it more like MS Volume Shadow Copy (to
   which it claims to be analogous). I.e., you would use the snapshots
   to create a fixed instance in time that you would then use BackupPC
   to create a stable file-by-file backup against.

   For Linux, restoring against this would be no different from
   rebooting after a system crash. So you would be able to do a full
   metal restore modulo any data that is affected by a normal
   crash. Except that since you have backed up the state of the
   machine, even that wouldn't necessarily be lost.

3. I do like the idea of being able to make stable snapshots on
   regular block device without needing LVM or xfs. Automating this
   in DumpPreUserCmd could be interesting...

Have you actually tried the software?



   

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