| How To Configure a Bootable USB drive for bare metal recovery (SBAdmin v7) |
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Using Storix SBAdmin it is possible to use a dedicated hard disk for full system backup and recovery. On the Linux x86 platform it is becoming more and more common to add additional disks via USB. This how-to will walk through the steps necessary to create a bootable USB disk, and utilize it for Storix full system recovery. The disk may then be used to recover the original system or migrating the system to new hardware. Prerequisites
Creating a bootable USB drive for bare metal recoveryDeterminine the attached drive**For this example the USB disk will be refered to as sdb, please note if you are running internal scsi or sata disks sda may be a system disk. Make sure to properly identify your removeable disk before making any changes**
Most USB hard drives and flash drives come pre-formatted. In order to use the drive for full system recovery with Storix we will need to remove all partitions from the disk using the fdisk utility. This process will erase ALL DATA on the disk! First, make sure any filesystems on the USB disk are not mounted. (The following output shows partition 1 of sdb mounted on media disk) #df If your USB disk is mounted, use the umount command to unmount it.
#umount /media/disk
Note, If the disk is defined in /etc/fstab Storix will not dedicate the disk for system recovery. Using Storix to configure the disk for system backupOpen the Storix graphical interface by running the following command.
#sbadmin From the graphical interface select Configure > Clients .
For the Client Hostname/IP: use the drop down to select the client with the USB drive attached. (For this example the hostname is storix2)
Now use the dropdown button next to the Disks for local System Backups field to select the disk that will be used (sdb in our case). The default mount point Storix will use is /backups/local/system , if you would like the client to mount the filesystem somewhere else, you may change this path.
By default, Storix will select to use LVM when configuring the disk. When using USB disks it is often preferable to use a partition based disk. Choose the option Partition (1 disk max) .
 Press the Save button and you will see one last warning that all the data on the disk will be overwritten. Choose Yes and the disk will be made into a Storix backup disk. At this point the disk is bootable and any FULL_SYSTEM type backup written to the disk may be used for full system recovery. ConclusionWith the ability of restoring to different hardware and dedicating a USB disk for both system backups and boot media. SBAdmin not only allows for easy backups over the network, but the ability to take backups and boot media off the network or offsite for recovery into a disaster recovery environment.
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