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Want Factory Restore/System Rescue for Linux?

June 12th, 2014 by

Considering that My sCool Server will be deployed in many schools, some in remote places and Linux system administration knowledge is quite rare, and users quite new to this whole Linux way of doing thing, there are bound to be instances where some bug between chair and the keyboard, online update gone haywire, or may be “it just happened on it’s own” kind of thing, will make something stop working as configured. We needed a way to get the system in it’s original “Factory” setting easily and quickly. Enter recovery-kit.

Recovery-kit allows creation of “Factory Restore” from installed system, once the system is installed and everything is configured as needed. In fact it can be created any time administrator thinks that the system is in good state to roll back to in disaster situation. It adds menu entry to grub2 selecting which will extract recovery archives created earlier to restore the system to that state.

It also allows creation of recovery system on USB stick, which we intend to hide inside the box, just in case something like /boot or the rescue archives disappear from the installed system. Admins can then boot from that stick and restore the system.

What it does not do is it cannot restore damaged/lost partitions, as long as root partition is available the system should restore to last backed up state.

Get the package for openSUSE from here or if you want to test and develop for currently unsupported distribution get the code from here, go on fork and submit improvements.

Note: Here “Factory” does not mean the openSUSE “Factory”.

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5 Responses to “Want Factory Restore/System Rescue for Linux?”

  1. dherman

    opensuse,

    Looks like recovery-kit (for suse 13.1is looking for no longer supported fdisk version,
    “nothing provides fdisk”, should require gptfdisk instead?

  2. Jigish Gohil

    Package fixed, added Requires:util-linux

  3. mikrios

    Where do I can get a small tutorial on using ?

    Thanks

    Regards

  4. Jigish Gohil

    Here: http://software.opensuse.org/package/recovery-kit