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Filesystem Backup Again

April 8th, 2006 by George Notaras

Some months ago, I had written a guide about using PartImage to take snapshots of linux partitions either locally or remotely. Some readers had recommended some other tools, as you can see in the comments on that page, since the development of PartImage seems to have stopped (it still works ok for me though). Anyway, the quest for good utilities for disaster recovery or for the usual filesystem backup and restore operations never ends…

Another tool, Mondo Rescue, has been brought to my attention lately. I haven’t tried it yet though, but seems like a decent filesystem snapshot taking solution. From what the project information page says, it can be used with many filesystem types, including NTFS. The statement that “Mondo is in use by Lockheed-Martin, Nortel Networks, Siemens, HP, IBM, NASA’s JPL, the US Dept of Agriculture, dozens of smaller companies, and tens of thousands of users.” actually convinced me to try it some time.

From the official Mondo project page:

Mondo is comprehensive. Mondo supports LVM 1/2, RAID, ext2, ext3, JFS, XFS, ReiserFS, VFAT, and can support additional filesystems easily: just e-mail the mailing list with your request. It supports software raid as well as most hardware raid controllers. It supports adjustments in disk geometry, including migration from non-RAID to RAID. Mondo runs on all major Linux distributions (RedHat, RHEL, SuSE, SLES, Mandriva, Debian) and is getting better all the time. You may even use it to backup non-Linux partitions, such as NTFS.

The most important thing is that the code is GPL-ed.

Also, there is an official HOWTO:

This HOWTO serves to help people get started with using mondo/mindi as way to backup/restore their system. This is a work constantly evolving. It was started by Hugo Rabson and has since been worked upon by a number of people. See the ‘About’ web page for a list of members of the development team.

Well, I would really like to hear any opinions from people who have actually used this tool. Looks really promising.

The Filesystem Backup Again by George Notaras, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

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2 Responses to “Filesystem Backup Again”

  1. Nick Says :
    February 9th, 2007 at 8:06 pm

    I plan to use Mondo for my next backup of a mixed Linux/ Windows system. Its main failing seems to be that it doesn’t support backing up a windows only environment, however, I might try it from a live cd.

  2. GNot Says :
    February 10th, 2007 at 12:11 pm

    Hi Nick, I’d like to read about the experience of using it. If you post it somewhere, drop me a line with the link.

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