Home Backup with Mondo Rescue

This was originally posted on my family blog on 4/5/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog.

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.

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