Best Practices for Disaster / Recovery.

[G-Funk]

Greetings everyone .......

So I have my Untangle box up and running, right now with a virgin configuration which I will elaborate on further in a different post, as I have some "best practices" questions on that, due to the nature of the company I now work with.

Also - I wasn't really sure where to post this thread, so I thought the Installation Forum would be best. Moderators - if this thread should be moved please do so.

With that all said, and I know there will be varying opinions to this, what would you consider best practice for disaster recovery.

Here's my HW setup and what I plan to do at present, and then in the future.

I am using a Supermicro 525 box with dual drives in it.
* Primary drive is the running system.
* Secondary drive is for retaining current images of the primary drive.

I am waiting for (believe it or not) some SATA cables and Molex 4 pin to SATA power cable adapters to come in so I can the secondary drive, which is physically mounted in the box, in the quick draw position. In fact, that part may be moot, but when I get to section two of this post in a second I think that it'll need to be powered up - more on that in a moment.

Oh - and just an FYI - I know some linux, but I am by no means a guru, but I always dig learning - just wanted to throw that out there.

So here finally comes the question, and what I am currently going to do.

Before fully deploying untangle as the gateway (which I have a second gateway via an ASA and different provider) I am think about bringing the box offline, opening her up, attaching the power and data cables to the secondary drive, and doing a fresh install on it, and configuring it the same as it is on the primary drive. Then put the cables back on the primary drive, and do a backup of the current config through untangle's UI.

Or, should I (at present) attach a USB drive to the box and use Clonezilla right now to create an image on the external USB drive? I would assume at this point - I would use Clonezilla to make an image of the primary drive not a clone, correct?

In the future, when I have both internal drives attached, I plan on using Clonezilla to clone the drives, as both drives are the same size, etc. I would do this after config changes, and perhaps on a quarterly basis, just because.

So all in all, at present, should I just perform another install on the secondary drive, and then backup the config on the primary? Or should I use Clonezilla to image the primary internal drive onto an external USB drive?

Any thoughts, suggestions, or ideas would be most appreciated.

And I'm sure I'll have more questions as time goes on .......

Thanks .......

G.

[sky-knight]

Clonezilla can to drive to drive images, as well as drive to image images.

So if you want a drive in the box that is simply a cold spare drive for the purpose of backing up Untangle. I'd just have a Clonezilla USB key floating around and do a periodic disk to disk image. Heck, I'd have the drive attached and powered up all the time. If you have IPMI in the box you can use the IPKVM functionality to disable the primary drive and boot to the secondary in the event the device fails remotely.

This is one of the primary reasons why all of my servers ship with a CF card installed that contains clonezilla. There are too many useful things to do with an internal imaging platform to work with a disaster recovery plan.

[G-Funk]

Clonezilla can to drive to drive images, as well as drive to image images.

So if you want a drive in the box that is simply a cold spare drive for the purpose of backing up Untangle. I'd just have a Clonezilla USB key floating around and do a periodic disk to disk image. Heck, I'd have the drive attached and powered up all the time. If you have IPMI in the box you can use the IPKVM functionality to disable the primary drive and boot to the secondary in the event the device fails remotely.

This is one of the primary reasons why all of my servers ship with a CF card installed that contains clonezilla. There are too many useful things to do with an internal imaging platform to work with a disaster recovery plan.

Thank you, and that is what I've done except it was with a Clonezilla DVD I burned. I'll have to look into IPMI because that sounds ideal to switch drives.

Thanks for the info, yet again.

G.