[Tfug] Clonezilla and bare metal backups or, "Symantec Ghost - I'm leaving you"

[Bowie J. Poag]

Anyone who voluntarrily subjects their data to the protection of any 
product owned by Symantec does so at their own peril, imho. I trust 
Symantec about as far as I can throw a Buick.

We're forced to use NetBackup where I am..Worse, NetBackup in a tape 
environment. I know, I know, cue the ragtime piano music... It's like 
we're stuck with the worst possible equation you could possibly trust 
your data with. We're putting our data,  in a proprietary format, on 
antiquated (tape!) storage, using overpriced product, with a buggy 
interface, that was knowingly shipped to the public in a corrupt state, 
by a company who's lack of customer service is absolutely legendary.

Thank god we're getting a ton of new storage soon. First thing i'm going 
to do is carve out space for online backups. Maybe within the 5 years I 
can convince my employer to get rid of NetBackup in favor of something 
sane, open, and supportable. The guy who used to be repsonsible for 
NetBackup got a job elsewhere, so, my boss approached the other guys on 
this guy's team to pick up the responsibility. None of them would. And 
these are Windows folks -- People who are used to dealing with 
crapplications out the wazoo. Even THEY wouldn't touch NetBackup!

The only reason I volunteered for it is because I wanted to be sure 
*somebody* took care of it!

Cheers,
Bowie











Eric Gearhart wrote:
> Has anyone setup a Clonezilla server, to image
> computers/servers/laptops remotely (look ma no CD or USB stick!) via
> PXE booting?
>
> I just set this up at work the other day, and it's completely awesome.
> I can press F12 on the Dell servers as they boot, they PXE boot off
> the network, then I'm presented with a menu asking if I want to save
> an image of the server I'm on or restore an image to the server I'm
> on.
>
> When the servers are imaged, if they're using a partimage supported
> filesystem (ext2, ext3, ntfs, I'm sure there's more...) partimage will
> only image the used space on the partition and not just blindly "dd"
> over the entire partition, saving time and bandwidth. Also as
> partitions are imaged, different compression is available as well
> ranging from "none" to "lots."
>
> http://packratstudios.com/index.php/2008/04/20/how-to-setup-clonezilla-on-linux-ubuntu-quick-start-guide/
> was the quick start guide that lays everything out quickly and simply.
>
> I've tested this on both Linux and Windows servers, and it works great
> for both. Seems like an excellent FOSS bare metal backup solution than
> can even properly image proprietary OSes
>
> Also on the Windows side, you can apparently setup "winroll" which
> will allow you to change the Windows Security Identifier (SID), which
> is something you're "really supposed to do" when imaging Windows
> servers... different things can get really wonky when two SIDs are
> exactly the same on two separate machines on the network (AD computer
> accounts can get weird, etc)
>
> --
> Eric
> http://nixwizard.net
>
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