Backing up your system configuration

When backing up servers with any kind of backup software you will most certainly backup your data.

But how about the system configuration?

When restoring a system from scratch do you know how big the disks were, what partition sizes, what disks used (in case you have more than one disk), if you used an LVM and so on.

Think about it!

In this article i wanted to summarize what system information should be collected to enable a fast and error free restore.

Update: There is an article regarding this topic here.

Feel free to add your own comments and suggestions.

Linux

• General Information
  • Output of “hostname”
  • Output of “domainname”
  • Output of “uname -a”
  • Output of “ifconfig -a”
• Partition Information
  • Output of “fdisk -l”
  • Output of “df -h”
• Volume Manager
  • Output of “vgdisplay”
  • Output of “lvdisplay”
  • Output of “pvdisplay”
  • vgcfgbackup

Solaris

• General Information
  • Output of “hostname”
  • Output of “domainname”
  • Output of “ifconfig -a”
  • Output of “uname -a”
• Partition Information
  • “format” information for each disk
  • Output of “df -h
• Volume Manager
  • ZFS
    • Output of “zpool list”
    • Ouput of  “zpool status”
    • Output of “zfs info”
    • Output of “zfs list -o all
  • VxVM
    • Output of “vxdevlist”
    • <need some help here>
  • SVM (SDS)
    • Output of “mestastat”
  • Backup of VTOC

Oracle

• ASM
  • ASM device mapping information (for instance with this script)
• Clusterware
  • Backup of OCR
  • Backup of Voting Disk
• Database
  • “backup control file to trace”
  • (s)pfile