[LON-CAPA-admin] system restore experience

[Jim Maxka]

I wanted to share my cheap backup system that has been fairly easy to 
recover after two recent server crashes -- one was a MB that blew and 
the other was a less than ideal replacement.  I never really knew how 
easy the recovery would be, but it wasn't bad with some help from Guy 
the first time.

I am not there to do hard backups.  So, I have been doing soft backups,  
using rsnapshot -- http://rsnapshot.org over ssh.  Because we are so 
short on funding, I back up at 2 different times onto the access servers 
at low load times.  The permissions are preserved as numeric ids, so all 
I have had to do is replace the UID and GID in the /etc files and 
everything works fine.
--Jim

If anyone wants details, I am happy to provide more details.