Baremetal Backup/Restore - Another Approach
===========================================


Overview
--------

Many commercial and open source solutions exist to solve the
problem of being able to 

Backup
------


Restore
-------


Conclusions & Limitations
-------------------------

- This seems to work fine in the limited configuration that was tested.

- The upside of this approach is that you can use standard Linux
  commands to do imaged backups of your machine.

- There are two downsides:

    1) You cannot do this while the machine is up and running.

    2) Every block in the partition gets copied whether it is used or not.

- In *theory* this should also work on SAN-booted machines so long as
  the exact same LUN (WWID and size) is presented for the restore as
  was used for the backup.  However, this was not tested and theory
  and Reality usually collide in rather nasty ways.  Mr. Murphy is not
  our friend.

- Same story for VMs.  Not tested.  It's unclear whether a VM booted
  from a rescue disk would see the underlying disk storage (VMDK or
  whatever).

- Again, *theoretically* this should work with other operating system
  partitions and data partitions.  But ... not tested.



Document Information & Disclaimer
---------------------------------

This document describes an *experimental* procedure for learning
purposes.  It has not been tested in all possible hardware, operating
system, and network configurations.  You should not trust this
approach unless you prove that you can backup *and* restore correctly in *your
environment*.

Copyright (c) 2014, TundraWare Inc.

$Id: baremetal.rst,v 1.100 2014/08/22 21:29:01 tundra Exp $