Just protect your data. [LWN.net]

Just protect your data.

Posted Mar 2, 2006 3:12 UTC (Thu) by brugolsky (subscriber, #28)
Parent article: Testing the bleeding edge

The key to running a development distro is to have a recovery plan. Either do nightly backups before updating, use a snapshotting mechanism, use a virtualization environment, run from an NFS/CIFS server, etc.

An NFS server is useful for all sorts of testing/debugging, as one can run a stable distro on the server, and the unstable distro on the client. With gigabit NICs connecting the two, the performance may be better than local disk.

Xen offers a similar possibilities in a single box.

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Just protect your data.

Posted Mar 2, 2006 14:47 UTC (Thu) by jabby (guest, #2648) [Link]

Absolutely. So, is there anything that the development version of the distro can do to facilitate or implement this for the unaware or lazy tester?

For instance, could Rawhide maintain a failsafe backup RPM database and a snapshot solution for /etc/, /boot/, /usr/local/, ... that allows one to successfully recover from a catastrophic failure? Obviously, this would not help if all of the filesystems are deleted, but that should be rare and we wouldn't want to take *all* the fun out if it... :-)

I know that I would be more likely to run a development distro if there were some sort of built-in recovery tool included. I don't want to have to learn and set up a snapshot/recovery system. (Yes, I'm the lazy tester.)

Oh, and could you make it a nice red button? ;-)

Make protecting your data REALLY easy

Posted Mar 3, 2006 2:19 UTC (Fri) by dwheeler (subscriber, #1216) [Link]

How's this -- before you can complete the boot, make sure that there's a remote backup system, with checkpointing, so that data is constantly backed up? Actually, having a really good backup system easily set up isn't a bad idea for the "stable" things... :-).