> 1. A snapshot of your hard disk configuration.
> 2. A copy of your current Bacula file daemon that can be run on
>    a rescue system (i.e. probably statically linked).
> 3. A bunch of scripts that can be used to do various recovery tasks
> (bring up the network, repartition your hard disks as they were,
reformat
> your
> hard disks, ...).  Obviously you would use only those scripts that are
> really
> necessary.
> 4. All sorts of binaries to make recovery easy.
> 5. All this put together with your current kernel on a CDROM that can
be
> booted.
> [..snip..]
> The path I am exploring for the moment is simply packaging the output
from
> items 1-4 onto tar file that the user can save to a floppy or a CDROM.
I
> am
> also considering the possibility of remastering rescue disks and
adding
> the
> Bacula data, but that is probably also a black hole of distro
dependent
> code ...
> 
> If anyone has some better ideas, I would appreciate it to hear them
...

It would be really handy if the FD saved the above tar file as a normal
part of the backup run (would only be a few KB, so negligible amount of
extra work/data to transfer). I'm not so convinced that maintaining
partitioning data is all that useful any more -- when's the last time
you replaced a disk with an identical size disk? -- but it can't hurt. 

I've had very good luck with restoring Unix/Linux clients using a
Knoppix CD as the recovery CD. It has a bacula-fd package (albeit 1.36
vintage), and they go to great lengths to detect and handle hardware,
LVM and RAID detection and all the other hard stuff. Boot the Knoppix
CD, tell it where to find the Bacula SD and Dir in your config, and the
client id it's supposed to be using, do a full restore to the
replacement disk, and then do whatever you need to do for that distro to
make the replacement disk bootable. If you use grub, then there are text
and GUI tools on the Knoppix CD to handle that for you once you have
your grub config file accessible again. 

I haven't tried recovering a Windows system yet, but I suspect it
shouldn't be too different, at least because I use grub to boot my (few)
Windows boxen as well. It's too bad my OS/2 TSM standalone restore CD no
longer works on modern versions of Windows -- there were some good ideas
there. 

Key tricky bit is reconstructing the client ID and pwd string if you use
strong passwords and don't record them somewhere. A server-side client
data access ACL (eg, client X is allowed to access client Y's data)
might be a useful thing to think about for the future. 

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