Mondo Rescue – Disaster Recovery on Ubuntu

Have you ever faced a problem with your hard drive which almost (or actually) wiped out all your data? Or maybe your hard-drive got corrupted – in any case, there’s always a danger of losing important data. There is a way to recover from such disasters and that is to use tools which take snapshots of the hard-drive in real time. There are multitude of such tools available for Windows – Altiries, Norton Ghost and many more. Linux tools have not been very good in this area – until now. Welcome Mondo Rescue. Though this is quite an old tool, it has improved greatly in the recent past making it one of the best backup/rescue tools available.

With Mondo Rescue, it’s possible to take progressive backups and snapshots of your hard-drive, making is extremely easy and less time consuming. Mondo Rescue can be used to take backups or snapshots, save them to a verity of media like DVD, Hard-Drive, USB drives, NFS shares, tapes; which later can be used to read from and restore partitions quickly. It also supports a number of file-systems including LVM 1/2, RAID, ext2, ext3, ext4, JFS, XFS, ReiserFS, VFAT.

To install Mondo Rescue on Ubuntu, either manually download the deb file from here. Or, add it as a repository in Synaptic. Alternatively, you can install it from debian repositories with a simple

$aditya@archie:/>apt-get install mondo mondo-doc

And you’re done. Launch it by issuing mondoarchive command.

Taking Snapshot

• Mondo Rescue UI is a TUI (Text User Interface) built using nCurses.
• You will first be presented with an option asking you for selecting the place to store backups.
• Upon selecting the option you will be asked to set the compression level.
• Leave it at average.
• Then you will be asked to select the directory(ies) you want to back up.
• Leaving it to root will backup entire system except /tmp, /proc, /sys (obviously).
• You can add multiple paths with spaces in between.
• Then you will be asked if you wish to exclude any directories.
• Similar to previous case, add multiple paths with space in between.
• Leave this field blank if you do not want to exclude any directory.
• Most Ubuntu users should say yes on next screen about the kernel. Unless you have built one yourself.
• Next, Mondo will ask if you wish to verify the backed up data. Chose an option you want though verifying is always better.
• Backup process with begin now. There are a lot of things Mondo will do (including calling Mindi for bootable media generation and disk image creation to keep backup compatible with your disk).
• It also catalogs your files for a neat compression and allocation.

The backup process will begin now. You can do whatever you want in this time. I advice against adding new files to the system during this period. This might actually be a good time to get that exercise routine you always had in mind.

Restoring Data

If you have completely toasted your Hard-Drive then restoring the computer is not very easy. You will have to boot from the media you backed your data on and then to a restore procedure. We won’t discuss it at this time cause it calls for its own different how-to. We will focus on the part where you can boot your computer, maybe you have wiped some partition and want to restore it. To do that, launch Mondo Rescue again and

• Chose the backup media.
• Press okay after you connect the media/insert CD/DVD/tape.
• Select the directories you wish to restore.
• Select where you want to restore the files.
• Sit back and wait till Mondo finished the restoring process.

And voila! You have your old system back, up and running in virtually no time.

Mondo Rescue is a good option to have for your data recovery needs. The act that it can also act as a backup manager is a major plus point. Being a console junkie, I love the nCurses based interface but it might turn a few users away. The multi CD/DVD support, tape support, ability to interact with abundance of file systems (including Windows file systems) makes Mondo Rescue a big player in the market. Apart from a few quirks with Windows backups, Mondo Rescue is quite good.