Imagine your disk drive has just become a very expensive hockey puck. Imagine you have had a fire, and your computer case now looks like something Salvador Dalı̃ would like to paint. Now what? Total restore, sometimes called bare metal recovery, is the process of rebuilding a computer after a catastrophic failure. In order to make a total restoration, you must have complete backups, not only of your file system, but of partition information and other data. This HOWTO is a step-by-step tutorial on how to back up a Linux computer so as to be able to make a bare metal recovery, and how to make that bare metal recovery. It includes some related scripts.
Copyright © 2001 through last date of modification Charles Curley and distributed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) license. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.
This was originally prepared for the Linux Documentation Project, http://www.tldp.org/. It is now available on Github, at https://github.com/charlescurley.
The HOWTO is available in a number of formats. See the Makefile for possible targets.
The largest defect of this HOWTO is that there is no discussion of EFI. Contributions are welcome.
If you just want the scripts, see the subdirectory src. Rename the
files there by removing the .s at the end of the file name. or build
the directory scripts.
Debian packages you may want, among others:
apt install make (open)?jade jadetex docbook ldp-docbook-dsssl lynx
Depending on whether your distribution provides jade or openjade, you
may have to edit the makefile, Makefile.
This directory has the SGML source and related files for the Linux Complete Backup and Recovery HOWTO. It should have everything you need by way of source to build the HOWTO in various formats such as pdf, HTML and TeX.
Run make clean, then make scripts. That will build some
directories and do some other stuff for you. Then you can run make all to build the whole kazoo, or make html to build just the html
files, etc. For a complete list of the available targets, see the file
Makefile.
Making the .dvi and .pdf files may fail. Simply run the same make command again. I don't understand it either.
The sources for the scripts are in the subdirectory src. Copies
exactly as I use them on my test environment are in the subdirectory
scripts. To install the scripts, cd to scripts and run install
as root.
With the small amount of editing described in the HOWTO the scripts
should be ready for you to use. They are here so that the SGML source
for the HOWTO can incorporate them by inclusion, rather like C's
#include. Before the SGML translator code can use the scripts, some
SGML cruft has to be added to each one. The cooked scripts end up in
the directory cooked.
You may add scripts to the src subdirectory. Add them to the
file src/Makefile. Make sure you call the new script from cooked or
it won't pass SGML verification. See the tags at the
top of the SGML source file for examples.
The target clean gets rid of intermediate files like the cooked
scripts and all of the final production. Use it to be sure you have
killed off any intermediate cruft. Then run make scripts.
You may have to edit the paths to the style sheets. This works on Debian 10.5 "buster". BTW, I use GNU Make version 4.2.
Enjoy. Happy backing up.