Topic: How thorough is e-smiths desktop backup/restore?

[sam russo]

This is simple Question.
As a administrator of an e-smith box (4.1.2) I am worried that the e-smith backup to desktop will not produce a complete restore in the event that disaster happens.
SO IS THERE ANYONE OUT THERE WHO HAS APPLIED A RESTORE FULLY?
ie. Make a clean 4.1.2 install then restore from desktop.
Does everything get restored?:
Examples:
1. Are all the users back?
2. Does mysql restore all the DBS's. (What about the .my.cnf password?)
3. Do all the i-bays get restored correctly.
4. What about any customising that was done. e.g I have installed squidGuard manually. Will this get restored.
5. All the ISP info.

It is important that anyone who has had the experience of this comment as e-smith is a great product and we administrators need to know that we can restore a system fully is disaster strikes
regards sam

[steve macgregor]

I would like to know the same thing as last week I was trying to change hard drives and was unable to restore everything I needed to, which resulted in a lot of down time and way too much frustration. A friend of mine said that some sort of ghost program could just copy the hard drive, but I am clueless as to how I might proceed in doing this.

Any help would be appreciated!

-steve

[Kelvin Lee]

Hi all,

I might be mistaken, but I think the desktop restore will put back any user files created BUT you have to re-install any and all custom modules (not templates) and upgrades again manually.

It would be preferable to have a backup system does a COMPLETE backup / restore for disaster recovery purposes (time is always an issue when trying to bring a server back up from scratch). Additionally, a backup system that has an easy interface to selectively restore files / folders would also be good. This has obviously come up before ......

Kelvin

[Kees]

Hi,

Of course you did a search through the forums, and are fully aware of the limitations of various OS's ???

If not, that would be a good place to start!

just my 2c..

kees

[Charlie Brady]

sam russo wrote:

> As a administrator of an e-smith box (4.1.2) I am worried
> that the e-smith backup to desktop will not produce a
> complete restore in the event that disaster happens.
> SO IS THERE ANYONE OUT THERE WHO HAS APPLIED A RESTORE FULLY?

Yes.

> ie. Make a clean 4.1.2 install then restore from desktop.
> Does everything get restored?:
> Examples:
> 1. Are all the users back?

Yes.

> 2. Does mysql restore all the DBS's. (What about the .my.cnf
> password?)

Yes.

> 3. Do all the i-bays get restored correctly.

Yes.

> 4. What about any customising that was done. e.g I have
> installed squidGuard manually. Will this get restored.

Custom configuration done using custom templates is restored. Any additional software is not restore. What you should do is to keep RPMs of all additional in an i-bay, then install them all after doing a restore.

> 5. All the ISP info.

All configuration info, custom templates, i-bays, databases and user accounts and home directories are restored.

Regards

Charlie

[sam russo]

Thanks Charlie
I'll do a backup of rpms and notes of any "Customising" I've done.
Now its time to perform a trial run by restoring from desktop after a clean 4.1.2 install.

[Julian Luton]

Dear Sam

How did it go - I was just wondering if your backup/restore was without any hickups.

Yours,
Julian