Home Backup with Mondo Rescue
I’m playing with Mondo Rescue for backing up my hard drive. Here are some quick notes of the experience so far.
I ran a basic
mondoarchive “gui” session, and accepted all defaults, except that I
excluded /mnt from the backup. It asked for a max iso size, I didn’t
ever plan to burn these to anything, but I put in 700 MB because I
didn’t know what else to do. I backed up to hard drive (the unused hd
on my system). It spent about 13 hours working, created 50 isos and
then quit. I didn’t see it quit, and from the log it looks like it
gave up with the message “too many isos.” No kidding.
Now I’m attempting to restore a single file. I typed mondorestore.
The “gui” started up and told me to insert the boot disk. I just hit
enter and it went to a menu asking what to restore from. I chose
harddrive. It asked for the path to my isos. I gave it the path and
it took off and after some work it showed me a file list from which I
could select what I wanted to restore. I dug down and selected a
single rpm file from my downloads directory (something that never
should have been backed up, but oh well). It then asked me where to
restore to, so I gave it a path on the (previously) unused hard drive.
It’s now chugging through all 50 isos looking for the file, telling
me, “This may take some time.” No kidding! OK, I was watching and it
finished with an error in the middle of trying to do something with my
large files:
# mondorestore ---FATALERROR--- Mommy!
However, it did restore the one file I asked it to!
I’m feeling pretty darn good about mondo at this point. It seems
super easy to use, and does what I want. I think I’ll be able to skip
backing up some key directories, such as my music, and get a
manageable set of stuff so it won’t have to create too many isos and
have these problems.
Things to try just to be sure:
- Only back up some stuff on my hard drive (try to get way fewer isos).
- Make sure the restore from the smaller backup works.
- Try out the differential backup feature.
Posted by Bryan on April 6, 2006
