A guide using sshfs for Relax and Recover (ReaR): bare-metal server backup & restore (or migrate) for Linux
Until I discovered this open source tool Relax and Recover, I wished I could do snapshots of some bare-metal dedicated servers, like if they're VMs, but they're not...
So, no virtualization, no easy snapshots. And therefore no easy way to fully recov...
Vaughan Wickham
Hello Juan,
A really useful article, thanks for sharing.
I'm relatively new to Linux and ReaR, although I have some ReaR experience having already setting up a local backup; your guide on configuring sshfs was very helpful.
I had an issue with the sshfs authentication initially. I wanted to use the public key authentication and I followed the instructions, but was still being prompted for a password initially.
I worked out that I needed to change the OUTPUT_URL and BACKUP_URL from user@host to just host. This may be obvious to someone who is experienced with sshfs; but perhaps you could add a comment about this for newbie's.
A couple of questions
Q1. I noticed with my first test backup. After creating the recovery ISO, during the tar archive, the Internet must have been disrupted and rear appears to have hung during this step. Do you know if there are settings to configure a timeout? I'm planning on scheduling the backups rather than doing them manually. So I'll need to be able to cope with this.
Q2. With local backups, you can use USB_RETAIN_BACKUP_NR=10 to configure the number of copies retained. Do you know if there is a similar setting for sshfs?
Thanks again
VW