Guard Against Data Loss with Mondo Rescue

Every computer user has lost data at some point. Unfortunately, the experience rarely teaches the user to backup his or her data regularly. Mondo Rescue creates one or more bootable Rescue CDs based on your filesystem. In the event of catastrophic data loss, you will be able to restore your entire system. Mondo supports Lin/Win dual-boot systems, RAID, ReiserFS, ext2, ext3, XFS, JFS and VFAT.

I wrote Mondo because no other program did what I wanted, nor was any program as easy to use. I back up, wipe, format and restore my own system at least three times a week using Mondo's latest release. Mondo is the only backup regime that I use.

Mondo is a thriving open-source project; it can restore your OS and data from bare metal, and data loss has not been reported since May 2000. The project is coming along nicely.

In the beginning, Mondo was created to back up Windows-only systems and provide disaster recovery facilities for Windows users. While running a small computer store near Nashville, Tennessee, I realized that many of the people that bought computers from us were bringing them back to have the disks reformatted and the applications re-installed. Was this because they did not know how to maintain their own PCs? Was our hardware to blame? Either way, we needed a way to restore a fresh copy of Windows onto a typical PC, unattended, in 10-15 minutes. We were using Norton Ghost at the time, but Ghost didn't let us restore selectively; it was all or nothing. Also, Ghost tended to crash when copying Linux partitions.

Our idea was to run Linux on a CD but have Windows archived in big tarballs on said CD. Well, to cut a long and tortuous story short, it worked. I even managed to write code that would create a Windows-bootable VFAT partition.

In March 2001, an employee of Hewlett-Packard (Grenoble) became interested in the project. Bruno Cornec, a skilled programmer in the server division, began to look at the code. He started to play with it and improved it in numerous ways. Between September 2000 (when the project was shut down) and March 2001, two new versions of Mondo were released. Both were made possible almost entirely by Bruno Cornec, Maciej Kulasa and other contributors.

In June 2001, I built a new computer and got to work. By July 4, I had fixed all the major bugs, and Mondo v1.00 was released (no jokes about Independence Day, please).

Mondo is just a bit shell script that wraps around two other tools: Mindi and afio.

Mindi, aka Mindi-Linux, is a mini-distribution that generates boot disks from your kernel, modules, tools and libraries. It is more likely than a generic boot disk to be binary-compatible with your existing software because its tools are copied straight from your hard disk. It also can generate an El Torito 2.88MB boot disk image. Mondo uses Mindi to create a 2.88MB boot “disk” and associated data “disks”, which are incorporated in each Mondo CD. Whichever modules were loaded at backup time are reloaded at boot time. So, in theory you will boot into almost the same environment you were in when you backed up.

Mondo-Archive works something like this:

Mindi v0.38 comes with a 2.4.7 fail-safe kernel, in case your kernel does not support all the features required by a boot disk. This is not Mondo being picky; this is Linux being awkward. Some kernels are just not suitable for boot disks. Novice users should stick with their default kernel and make Mindi use its own kernel by saying no when asked if they want to make a boot disk with their own kernel.

Advanced users should make sure that their kernel includes the following, built-in: CD-ROM support, IDE CD support, IDE support, initrd and RAM disk support, floppy disk drive support, stable loopfs support (which means it really needs to be 2.2.17 or later, or 2.4.5-ac10 or later) and ISO9660 support.

In case your kernel does not support these features, you should probably use Mindi's own kernel until you are confident enough to build your own kernel. If you find that Mindi's kernel does not support something you need (e.g., XFS) then please let me know. I will probably add the feature to the next release of Mindi.