Please note that these pages are updated only with stable releases. Please download the current development releases and test them and send us feedback.

Relax and Recover — rear

Introduction

Relax and Recover (abbreviated ReaR) is a highly modular disaster recovery framework for GNU/Linux based systems, but can be easily extended to other UNIX alike systems. The disaster recovery information (and maybe the backups) can be stored on the network, USB devices and DVD/CD-R. The result is a bootable rescue system that can be booted via PXE, DVD/CD and USB media.

The rear project is a spin-off of two existing projects:

OpenVPN Gateway Builder (OGB) of Schlomo Schapiro, and
Make CD-ROM Recovery (mkCDrec) of Gratien D'haese

We had the idea to take the best of both worlds. The modular concept of OGB and the disaster recovery part of mkCDrec. We are proud that we were able to release rear v1.0 with a few weeks of coding. That was only possible due to strict modular design and seperating duties within the design and coding.

We can only hope that we can/may inspire other developers to jump on our disaster recovery project and help us to improve and deliver new plug-ins.

One and a half years later, we are proud to release rear 1.6 amongst the knowledge that Relax & Recover is used by a growing community of end-users and contributors.

Purpose and Key Features

Focus on Disaster Recovery, not backup
P2V migrations (upcoming feature)
Modular concept — easy to extend with new features
For Linux and other Unix-like operations systems
No external dependancies - use only standard software supplied with the distribution
Linux: kernel > 2.6 supported (no kernel 2.2/2.4 support !)
User friendly - minimal output, use log file for error messages and details
Designed with enterprise environments and security issues in mind

The aim is to make rear as least demanding as possible, it will require only the applications neccessary to fulfill the job rear is configured for. All other applications will be copied to the rescue system if they are present.

Backup Software Integration

Besides several internal and generic methods to integrate with backup software, ReaR already includes integration modules with the following backup software solutions. The integration allows ReaR to use the backup software to restore the data from the backup server thus freeing you from the need to keep extra backups for disaster recovery purposes.

CommVault Galaxy 5
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.x
CommVault Galaxy 7 (from ReaR 1.7.6)
Veritas NetBackup (from ReaR 1.7.12)
HP Data Protector (from ReaR 1.7.12)

We wish to thank the respective contributors and sponsors for their support. If your favourite backup software is missing from this list, please contact us or submit a patch.

License

rear is licensed under the GNU General Public License

News

2009-11-01 ReaR is now able to handle P2V-migrations, from hardware to virtualized VMware systems and vice versa. This version isn't released at the moment. Please contact Heinlein Support for more details. This feature will be presented at the upcoming 4th. Secure Linux Administration Conference in Berlin.

2009-01-29 Development Version 1.7.14 released, we are getting closer to a new stable 1.8. Please download and test our development builds and run rear validate to report back about your success.

2008-12-01 We started to talk to Linux vendors about integrating ReaR into popular Linux distributions. However, we need more help: Sponsors for Fedora, Customers asking their Enterprise Linux vendor to include ReaR, Debian maintainers etc. If you can help us, please contact us through the mailing list or privately.

2008-08-08 Development Version 1.7.6 released

2007-12-05 Version 1.6 released, see sourforge project page for full information