Linux Complete Backup and Recovery HOWTO

Charles Curley

<charlescurley at charlescurley dot com>

Revision History
Revision 2.1	2006-03-28	Revised by: c^2
Added notes for NTFS. Edited the To Do list. Started work on LVM and using finnix.
Revision 2.0	2005-10-12	Revised by: c^2
Notes for Fedora Core 4. Removed notes for older versions of FC and Red Hat. Also, changes in the writeup and scripts to reflect using Knoppix instead of tomsrtbt. See the scripts for change notes. Changed some scripts so that long lines don't fall off the right side of printed pages (oops).
Revision 1.8	2005-02-19	Revised by: c^2
Added notes for Fedora Core 3
Revision 1.7	2004-05-11	Revised by: c^2
Adjusted copyright language.
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 1 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.