Posted by paulgear on Wed 4 Jun 2008 at 11:46
I've been doing a bit of searching through the Debian Administration archives and one thing that doesn't seem to have been discussed very much is full system recovery. There are plenty of discussions on different backup options, but nothing targeted at what seems to me the simplest possible backup scenario: protecting a single machine (specifically a server) so that if it is compromised it can be rolled back to a previous state.
My current disaster recovery plan for my (Internet accessible) server is: rebuild from scratch and copy in my rsnapshot backups as necessary. I'm very happy with the way rsnapshot gives me multiple point-in-time backups at very little cost in terms of disk space, but i'm a little concerned about the time to recover that my current plan would involve (especially since I'm self-employed, and time is money).
I've done some web searches and the product that seems to keep popping up is mondo. However, the last D-A article on mondo is a little old. Is it a good choice? Are there other good options?
My expected recovery scenario is having a recovery DVD or USB hard disk drive sitting off-site somewhere (if it's a DVD, i'd probably make a few copies and keep one on site), and recover from that and then restore my latest rsnapshot files from a USB hard disk. How many people have actually tested a disaster recovery plan similar to this and found it to be suitable in terms of quality of recovery and time taken to recover?
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