Make CD-ROM Recovery makes a bootable (El Torito) disaster recovery image (CDrec.iso), including backups of the linux system to the same CD-ROM (or CD-RW) if space permits, or to a multi-volume CD-ROM set. Otherwise, the backups can be stored on another local disk, NFS disk or (remote) tape.

After a disaster (disk crash or system intrusion) the system can be booted from the CD-ROM and one can restore the complete system as it was (at the time mkCDrec was run) with the command /etc/recovery/start-restore.sh

Disk cloning (clone-dsk.sh script) allows one to restore a disk to another disk (the destination disk does not have to be of the same size as it calculates the partition layout itself). A thrid script, restore-fs.sh, will restore only one filesystem to a partition of your choice, and the user can choose with which filesystem the partition has to be formatted.

Linux 2.2.x, 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels are supported, and if size of the kernel is not too big a boot floppy can be made, otherwise a 2.88 Mb boot floppy will be emulated on CD-ROM.

MkCDrec supports ext2 , ext3, minix, xfs , jfs, reiserfs file systems, LVM and software RAID (multiple devices). Each file system is backed up as a compressed tar archive (including the tar log). The compress program used is the user's choice (compress, gzip, bzip2, lzop,...)

But there is more: msdos, fat, vfat and ntfs mounted partitions are recognized and are saved as compressed dumps (on CD, tape, etc.)
The user has the possibility to encrypt all backups with openssl if desired (see the Config.sh configuration file for more information).

To restore your system completely just boot from the first CD-ROM made by mkCDrec and type "/etc/recovery/start-restore.sh " to restore everything from CD. Automatic Disaster Recovery and One Button Disaster Recovery are supported by mkCDrec too.
With the clone-dsk.sh script one can restore selective a disk or partitions to another free disk.

mkCDrec supports IDE (inclusive ATA), SCSI disks, hardware RAID based disks (e.g. Compaq SMART2 Disk Array), LVM and software RAID. With an El-Torito CD-ROM you can boot from an IDE or SCSI based CD-ROM drive on IA32/64, powermac and x86_64 GNU/Linux based computer systems only.

What's New in This Release:

· Default booting of the initial ramdisk happens via the ramfs file system.
· Support has been added for FedoraCore 7, and BusyBox has been updated to 1.7.2.
· All #!/bin/sh were replaced by #!/bin/bash so that scripts continue to work under newer Ubuntu versions.