NetBSD - Live Network Backup

dvl writes "It is possible but inconvenient to manually clone a hard disk drive remotely, using dd and netcat. der Mouse, a Montreal-based NetBSD developer, has developed tools that allow for automated, remote partition-level cloning to occur automatically on an opportunistic basis. A high-level description of the system has been posted at KernelTrap. This facility can be used to maintain complete duplicates of remote client laptop drives to a server system. This network mirroring facility will be presented at BSDCAN 2005 in Ottawa, ON on May 13-15."

Comments

Pros and Cons

[teiresias]

This would be an extremely sensitive server system. With everyones harddrive image just waiting to be blasted to a blank harddrive, the potential for misdeeds is staggering. Even in an offical capacity, I really feel uneasy if my boss was able to take a copy of my harddrive image and see what I've been working on. Admittely, yes it should all be work but here we are allowed a certain amount of freedom with our laptops and I wouldn't want to have that data at my bosses fingertips.

On the flipside, this would be a boon to company network admins especially with employees at remote sites who have a hard crash.

Another reason to build a high speed backbone. Getting my 80GB harddrive image from Seattle, while I'm in Norfolk would be a lot of downtime.

How long before this becomes a hack?

[Bret Tobey]

Assuming you can get around bandwidth monitoring, how long before this becomes incorporated into hacking tools. Add this to a little spyware and a zombie network and things get very interesting for poorly secured networks & computers.

Re:use rsync

[Skapare]

In most cases, file backups are better. Imaging a drive that is currently mounted writable and actively updated can produce a corrupt image on the backup. This is worse that what can happen when a machine is powered off and restarted. Because the sectors are read from the partition over a span of time, things can be extremely inconsistent. Drive imaging is safest only when the partition being copied is unmounted.

The way I make backups is to run duplicate servers. Then I let rsync keep the data files in sync on the backups. If the primary machine has any problems, the secondary can take over. There are other things that need to be done for this, like separate IP addresses for administrative access, and the network services being provided (so that the service addresses can be moved between machines as needed while the administrator can still SSH in to each one individually).