Ok, now that my RAQ has been reformatted and I'm reinstalling everything from scratch ...

How can I create a backup that will allow me to restore the system to the exact position it was prior to backup? Will the internal backup program work? Will it wipe any future hacks if I restore this backup?

Well prior to this hack, TB told me it would work, now they say it will only work if you first recreate all sites in the order you created them (as if i would remember), and maybe....if you're lucky..

There's been a lot of talk on this forum about the cobalt backup, and the people who had experience with it told us it would'nt work, but for me it was simpler to believe TB .

Someone posted a script some time ago wich seemed to work, but i'm to dumb to get it to work, guess i have to pay someone soon to do it for me, or get a server with a tapedrive and a RAID just to sleep well at night again.

That's not an option for me since the actual server is not in the same country i live.

Otherwise I'd run a Win2k server on my own machine. Win2K/XP might not be as stable as linux, but it can be made secure a lot easier. And even when hacked, I would have been abled to restore it very quickly.

Sadly, this is not the case and with a remote system, I'm a bit under the mercy of my host and the latest security update which may or may not be effective.

Hi Blight,

Unless you go to the trouble of using one of the high-$$ solutions like Veritas or Arkeia, you really can't backup the RaQ completely.... I supposed you could use a SCSI tape backup and a homemade script, but it's far easier to use a publicly available script called raqbackup.sh found here:

http://www.neuhaus-internet.de/cobalt/raqbackup/

It utilizes the CMU backup utility.

Run this regularly, then if your box gets hosed, have the OS restored, apply the updates, and then restore per the instructions on the page above.

And you're right, the Cobalt backup is false advertising, it flat out doesn't work.

Hpoe this helps

Brandon

Brandon, did you ever use this to restore a raq ?
And how hard to install is it ?

I've got this running, and installation is basically nothing more than answering a few questions on the download page, and put the .sh file into your cron.daily or whatever directory.

It then backups sites, mysql databases and dns zones to a ftp server.
Besides that I'm using the RAQ's backup thing to backup server files, and hope they work...

You might want to update some server stuff before using this utilty, including CMU (check out the raqbackup.sh page for the link)

I don't know about restoring though. I managed to get through uncompromised in the last year, which is mostly plain luck. I keep an eye on this forum and other things to stay up to date about what's going on. Seeing the "restore" rates that hosts require I hope to get through a lot longer. I'm kinda broke :(

Originally posted by dutchie
Brandon, did you ever use this to restore a raq ?
And how hard to install is it ?

I personally haven't had to, (luckily!) but others on the cobalt-users list have reported it works extremely well.

I personally wouldn't depend on the built-in backup for ANYTHING.