On Thursday, May 05, 2011 11:35:01 AM Les Mikesell wrote:
> On 5/5/2011 9:37 AM, Lamar Owen wrote:
> > I do dd imaging quite frequently, and as long as everything is LBA48 capable and setup, [snippage] .... using dd .... booted from rescue or live media of the OS that's installed...
> Clonezilla-live is a handy, faster way to do this.
I've recast my original message slightly, as you've missed a critical point: I use the cloning tool from the rescue or live media of the OS that's installed. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is that LVM, RAID, and some other things behave differently depending upon the kernel, lvm tools, etc, that's running the clone.
I'm familiar with and have used clonezilla numerous times, but not for this purpose. The 'using dd ... booted from rescue or live media of the OS that's installed' part isn't as important during backup as it can be during restore. And I have been bit by that, using F12 (or 13) live media to do a C4 backup/restore; some metadata got farkled and the restore didn't 'take' until I did the restore with C4 media.
Also, well, there are uses for manually-marked badblocks other than drive errors.... :-)
[snip]
> I always recommend backuppc for scheduled backups. It's pretty much
> configure and forget and it compresses and pools all identical content
> so you can keep much more history online than you would expect.
I've actually thought about using DragonFly BSD and its HAMMER filesystem for the backup storage device...... quick restores rely on quickly finding what is needed, and many times I get requests like 'please restore the file that has the stuff about the instrument we built for grant so-and-so' rather than an exact filename; greppability of the backup set is a must for us. Complete, straight-dd, clones are mountable (RO, of course) and searchable, and rolling rsyncs and tarballs are searchable without a whole lot of effort. Deduplication would be nice, but it's secondary, as is the time and space spent on the backup, for our purposes.
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