Sunday, December 11, 2011

Mondo Backup - GPL Bare Metal Recovery Solution


Here's an interesting alternative to using CloneZilla and the likes for Bare Metal Recovery:

Mondo Rescue is a free (GPL) powerful disaster recovery suite for Linux (i386, x86_64, ia64) and FreeBSD (i386). It's packaged for multiple distributions (RedHat, RHEL, SuSE, SLES, Mandriva, Debian, Gentoo). It's basically the Linux equivalent of the powerful AIX mkcd / mkdvd.

It supports backups to tapes, disks, network and CD/DVD. It also supports multiple filesystems (ext2, ext3, JFS, XFS, ResierFS, VFAT and even NTFS), LVM, software and hardware Raid.

Example of using Mondo Rescue:

Generate a bootable DVD that also backs up /etc and can recover files running mondorestore:
# mondoarchive -OVr -d /dev/dvd -9 -I /etc -gF
Another interesting tool worth checking out is System Imager (automates Linux installs).