Disaster recovery best practices

[RandomSF]

I am looking for a disaster recovery method whereby the full system is backed up ready to be restored to a new system. In the Windows world there are a variety of tools that can take an image of the entire system, making the restore a one step procedure and short time to a fully recovered system.

Does such a method exist for FreeBSD (likely not)?

If not, dump and restore appears to be the mostly suitable candidate. But the online resources I've found are generally incomplete or vague. Questions like how to script the snapshot portion of the backup along with temporary database server shutdown to get clean DB backups and minimize DB downtime are still missing.

Does such a Disaster Recovery document exist? Does someone have a method they use and would care to share? Should I be looking at a different method altogether?

[jb_daefo]

the shareware BootIt $35 or so (installable to a windows, and
maybe to its own partition, as well as to cd-r) is a
multiboot tool (supplanting GAG, maybe Grub, maybe the
BSD bootloader) which can backup FS as images (even multiple-ly
in BATCH mode)
opensource equivalents exist.
...........
no recc. per se on that as a Server solution as I have no experience
in it. But the freebsd-questions maillist archives have had many
discussions relevant to your question.

[TerryP]

I'm not a professional user of FreeBSD (as my job doesn't entail computers :-() but I would guess that the closest documents to it would be the handbook, dump manual, and sh manual. Depending on dumps output and the situation at hand it might be possible to take down the DB until the snapshots finished and then bring it back online through a script.


Depending on your situation you could probably use some form of database replication, i.e. one database servicing clients and another 'slave' database that is periodontally brought into sync with the master.

And set things up so that while one database goes offline during a dump, the other is rotated into servicing requests. And then sync the slave with the master before bringing it back online


At least, if maximizing database uptime was *my* primary concern that is the kind of thing I would look at trying to do.


Cheers.

[FloridaBSD]

The best disaster recovery scheme I can recommend to you is to back up your data religiously, in addition to this I highly recommend that every body whom has nay highly sensitive data on their hard drive envest in a network attached storage device.