Bacula-users

Re: [Bacula-users] Bacula Enhancements Request

2010-03-18 13:25:20
Subject: Re: [Bacula-users] Bacula Enhancements Request
From: Frank Sweetser <fs AT WPI DOT EDU>
To: Phil Stracchino <alaric AT metrocast DOT net>
Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:22:32 -0400
On 03/18/2010 10:37 AM, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> On 03/18/10 10:03, Jeronimo Zucco wrote:
>> On 03/16/2010 03:40 PM, Phil Stracchino wrote:
>>> Doing this portably is actually a rather difficult problem because there
>>> are so many different partitioning schemes and partition table formats
>>> out there.  It's a mess.
>>
>> Or we can used partimage based schema:
>>
>> http://www.partimage.org/Partimage-manual_Backup-partition-table
> 
> That page is extremely simplistic and assumes that all the world runs
> Linux on x86 hardware.  There are many disk partitioning schemes out
> there, and many kinds of partition table.  The MSDOS scheme used by x86
> Linux is only one of them.  Bacula, if it is to seamlessly handle
> bare-metal restore internally, needs to know about Linux/MSDOS partition
> tables, BSD partition tables, Sun diskslices, Mac OSX partitions, ....
> and so on.  And that's not even getting into the multiplicity of
> software RAID and logical volume managers (MD, LVM, LVM2, Solstice
> DiskSuite, ...) or advanced filesystems such as ZFS or btrfs that
> incorporate internal RAID/LVM functionality.

Oh, and don't forget EFS partition tables, too, not to mention trying to
restore on equivalent devices (same capacity, different geometry), restoring
on larger devices, restore a backup taken on 512 sector disks onto a 4k sector
disk...

And all of said logic would have to fit and work on a recovery disk.

> This really is not a simple problem.  Believe me on this.

Indeed.  While it would be great if this were to appear, it would almost
certainly be a pretty sizeable subproject on its own, with substantial upkeep
as new technologies appear.

Any volunteers? =)

-- 
Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu  |  For every problem, there is a solution that
WPI Senior Network Engineer   |  is simple, elegant, and wrong. - HL Mencken
    GPG fingerprint = 6174 1257 129E 0D21 D8D4  E8A3 8E39 29E3 E2E8 8CEC

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