On Sun, Sep 15, 2002 at 12:50:11PM +0100, Raphael Mankin wrote:
OK ,let's ask the awkward questions. 1.How many of the members of this list have *complete* backups the their umpteen-gigabyte disks? 2. How long would it take you to rebuild your system to ts *current* state after a disk crash?
1. well a complete backup is unecessary as I only backup data, and configs thats it. I have a partition mounted as /space which is where my music (which is backed up on the CDs i ripped it from) and downloads of software from the web most of which i have as .iso images. I don't understand why you would need to backup *everything* as that is not really necessary and would be a waste of time space and resources.
2. It took me about 4 hours to restore my debian desktop after I had that bad experience with gentoo, I had a copy of the packages list and did a base install off the CD, primed dpkg and apt-get (got) everything over the net which is what took the most time. I then also found the nice use for the debian kernel-package system as I had a backup of my kernel on CD so installed that which took 3 seconds as opposed to having to get kernel-source and rebuild it. After that I had about 1 hour of installing things like Nvidia drivers and restoring the backups of vmware etc. So the real work took me about 2 hours in total. so it took me 4 hours to rebuild my system, although I have rebuilt a fileserver which also did DNS and NIS and was crucial in 2 hours but with help from one other person, basically we did the same as I did for my desktop. The main differences/advantages were that we had a local debian mirror on site and the computer shop around the corner was open so we could get a new disk.
Although it could be worse you could be rebuilding a Windows system which I have found takes about well forever. It is never quite the same, and you always get new and interesting problems...
:) Adam