mksysb is a powerful tool, commonly known by AIX administrators. It creates
an online backup of a system for fast disaster recovery.
On AIX, mksysb takes care of creating a bootable image/medium, preserving the
system partitioning/LVM configuration and backing up the filesystems. The
result is a bootable medium (tape, image, DVD) that can be used to restore a
system to its original state.
The aim of this project is to create a similar tool that:
- Create a (generic) minimal bootable system
- Preserve the system partitioning/LVM configuration
- Backup the filesystem
All this within a single image that is easy to restore, either from itself
or from a PXE server.
The original idea lingered for a few years after which we collaborated with
the project.
This project implements most of the use-cases mksysb offers, but surpasses
it in functionality and technology support. If you are looking for a powerful
disaster recovery solution, a system snapshot tool, a simple way to restore
a backup to dissimilar hardware or even a system migration tool,
Relax-and-Recover is all of them.