[RndTbl] drive partitioning for Linux install

[Tim Lavoie]

On Sun, Oct 09, 2005 at 09:27:53PM -0500, Dan Martin wrote:

> That's the trick - keeping the OS, software, etc.  For data, I copy to 
> USB all the time.  But I have no way of booting if something happens to 
> the hard drive - hopefully by having a ghost of it I can pop in a new 
> drive if it fails, and restore from the ghost via USB.

Mondo is quite a helpful tool for the system side of things. It
creates a set of bootable CDs or DVDs, which are bootable and have the
partitioning information stored as well. It isn't as handy as some
programs for selective backups and restores, but can do a bare-metal
restore from nothing but the backup disks themselves.

It has saved my bacon a couple of times now, once when bad RAM allowed
my root filesystem to be corrupted beyond repair, and again when a
drive died on the old PC I use as a Linux-based firewall. Being able
to get back up without going through an entire reinstall-then-restore
dance is quite a boon. In the case of the firewall box, I was back up
after 1/2 hour, including small config changes to restore to an
alternate drive.

	Cheers,
	Tim