Michael Bruder asked:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Would any of you be willing to give me some advice on the best way to do a
> bare metal recovery of Linux?  The University that I work for is currently
> in the beginning stages of moving an Oracle 10g installation off of a
> dinosaur VMS server, and we cannot determine the best way to do a bare metal
> recovery of the RedHat Enterprise 4 OS that will house the new Oracle
> installation.  It was easy in VMS if we lost the operating system disk to
> just pop in a new drive, and restore the OS from tape.  This doesn't seem so
> easy with RedHat.  We are currently researching options, but I would
> appreciate any input.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Mike

Create a "hot + spare" set of partitions and back up to 'em every evening
using almost any of the "only copy the stuff that's changed and delete the
stuff that no longer exists" style backup programs _plus_ an extra step
at the end to reestablish the original /etc/fstab for the spare system
(which will ensure the "spare" system can be booted as a replacement for
the "hot" one).  The nice part about the "only what's changed" style
backups is that, even for very large systems, the backup usually runs
in less than 20 minutes (and, if you're not overly picky about getting
every last user file updated, the backup can be run during "production"
time, too).

Important: When creating the "spare" partitions, make sure they're
physically on different drives from the "hot" ones.  That way, you can
lose a drive and still have an up-to-date bootable system.

When setting up grub, make sure you can boot either the hot or the
spare system.  If you lose the drive with grub on it, you'll need to
re-install grub, and after doing so, can re-establish /boot from the
backup copy.

I've been using this method for years, have had drives go bad and have
never lost anything more than what changed since the previous backup.

As for the Oracle database itself, I'd suggest you use a mirrored RAID
array.  It's not usually as fast as other types of RAID (e.g.: striped),
but it is usually bulletproof with respect to having drives go sour.

Hope this helps and drop me a line if you need help finding the right
backup program'idly,

-S