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.

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