Relax & Recover downloads
Stable
Relax and Recover is a pure Bash script and thus does not require compilation. We provide a tar.gz as well as RPM and DEB packages of the latest stable version at the File Section of our SourceForge project page. Please note that the RPM and DEB files do not pull all required dependencies. ReaR will tell you if it misses something.
Unfortunately the stable versions tend to be very much outdated (the 1.6 release is from 2007!) so that we recommend to use the development versions and give us feedback. In general the developer releases are fairly stable since we release them only after some testing. The reason for that is that we would like to update the documentation (e.g. on this website) to match all the new and cool features that we managed to put into ReaR. As long as we don't manage that or find somebody who wants to assist with that there will be no new "stable" release. Please contact us if you want to help with this task.
Development
ReaR undergoes very active development and we tend to release a new development version every few weeks or months. The development version are published are published as source tar.gz at the File Section of our SourceForge project page.
RPM and DEB packages are also available for most Linux distributions from the openSuSE build service. You should try to use a matching RPM package because the RPM dependancies are somewhat different on different Linux distributions. Please note that the build service carries only the latest ReaR version, which might not be tested equally well on all Linux distributions. The fact that there is an RPM/DEB for a specific distribution does not mean that each release has been tested on it!
Installation
With RPM or DEB package
(See the included README file for full disclosure:)
On RPM/DEB based systems you should use the rear RPM/DEB files we provide. To keep up to date with ReaR development you can also subscribe to the appropriate YUM or debian repository from the openSuSE build service.
If you need to install ReaR on a very limited system where the package dependancies are too much (e.g. because of our lsb dependency), you can always install from tar.gz instead. As ReaR does not contain any binary files it is in any case fully portable amongst all platforms.
From source
To install rear manually, simply copy the etc and usr directories in the source distribution to the / of your system.
To create your own RPM or DEB package you should first install rear manually and then run rear mkrpm or rear mkdeb to create your own rear package.
First Steps
With the default installation you can run rear mkrescue to create a custom rescue system as an ISO image in /tmp/ReaR.iso. You should validate this rescue system by writing the ISO image to a CD and booting your computer from it (type rear at the boot prompt to actually start the rescue system).
The next step is to setup a backup scheme for your system (either use the internal NETFS backup method or one of the supported externel methods like rsync or a backup software like TSM). rear mkbackup will create the backup for you and the rescue system (for internal backup methods like NETFS only), otherwise you continue to use rear mkrescue to create the rescue system with the updated recovery configuration. The main configuration file for user configurations is /etc/rear/local.conf.
Where To Go From Here
You will have to familiarize yourself with the many features and customizable parameters of rear. The documentation provides a good starting point. For a full list of available configuration options take a look at /etc/rear/default.conf (or /usr/share/rear/conf/default.conf on recent ReaR development releases). Unfortunately we do not manage to write proper documentation pages for all features as they get implemented, but all new parameters are defined and explained in this file.
