MAJOR system backup performed — a little downtime.

Tonight, I performed a comprehensive system backup of this machine. Essentially a ‘snapshot’ of everything on this machine, I’m in the position of being able to completely restore the machine to today’s state in the case of a catastrophic loss.

It’s rather a long process, but thankfully, an automated one, thanks to Mindi/Mondo 0.58/1.40, an exceptionally smart backup/restore suite for Linux.

Right now, the large ISO files are being transfered across my home network to my Windows XP machine (which has the CD burner). These ISO images will be burned to three CDs and verified against the system. Once that’s done, I’ll be confident that the backup was successful. The server will be unavailable for about 90-120 minutes this evening while the backup and testing are completed.

Once that’s verified, I’ll be able to take this machine from "bare metal" to this configuration in just the time it takes to restore the backup. Nice.

From here on out, I’ll be able to do MUCH shorter "differential" backups — backing up only those files that were changed/added since the last complete backup.