NOTE ! http://rear.sourceforge.net is the latest & greatest documentation !
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                                Relax & Recover
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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 via the network, local on hard disks or USB devices, DVD/CD-R,
tape, etc. The result is also a bootable image that is capable of booting via
PXE, DVD/CD and tape (OBDR).

The backup can be also integrated with any existing backup software so that
ReaR utilizes the backup software to restore the files and provides the "glue"
surrounding the simple file restore to having a full bare metal disaster 
recovery solution. Support for specific backup software has to be added to
rear on an individual base and is very simple (look at the existing 
implementations for further information).

ReaR is rapidly developing, please contact the ReaR maintainers if something is 
missing.

REQUIREMENTS
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rear is written entirely in bash and does not require any external programs.
However, the rescue system that is created by rear requires some programs that
are needed to make our rescue system work:
- mingetty
- sfdisk
All other required programs (like sort, dd, grep, etc.) are so common, that we
don't list them as a requirement.


INSTALLATION
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On RPM based systems you should use the rear RPM. Either obtain it from the
rear homepage or build it yourself from the TAR archive with
   rpmbuild -ta rear-<version>.tar.gz
This will create an RPM for your distribution. The RPM is not platform-
dependant and should work also on other RPM based distributions.

On DEB based systems you should be able to install the RPM with alien. 
Otherwise use the manual installation (see below) or, even better, contribute
the DEB package to the project.

To install rear manually, simply copy the etc and usr directories in the source
distribution to the / of your system.


CONFIGURATION
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To configure rear you have to edit the configuration files in /etc/rear. All
*.conf files there are part of the configuration, but only site.conf and 
local.conf are intended for the user configuration. All other configuration
files hold defaults for various distributions and should not be changed.

In /etc/rear/templates there are also some template files which are use by rear
to create configuration files (mostly for the boot environment). You can use
these templates to prepend your own configurations to the configuration files
created by rear, for example you can edit PXE_pxelinux.cfg to add some general
pxelinux configuration you use (I put there stuff to install Linux over the 
network).

In almost all circumstances you have to configure two main settings and their
parameters: The backup method and the output method. 

The backup method defines, how your data was saved and wether rear should 
backup your data as part of the mkrescue process or wether you use an external
application, e.g. backup software to archive your data.

The output method defines how the rescue system is written to disk and how you
plan to boot the failed computer from the rescue system.

See /usr/share/rear/conf/default.conf for an overview of the possible methods and their
options. An example to use TSM for backup and PXE for output and would be to add
these lines to /etc/rear/local.conf:
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BACKUP=TSM
OUTPUT=PXE
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And since all your computers use NTP for time synchronisation, you should also
add these lines to /etc/rear/site.conf:
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TIMESYNC=NTP
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Don't forget to distribute the site.conf to all your systems.

The resulting PXE files (kernel, initrd and pxelinux configuration) will be
written to files in /tmp. You can now modify the behaviour by copying the 
appropriate configuration variables from default.conf to local.conf and
changing them to suit your environment. 


USAGE
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To use rear you always call the main script /usr/sbin/rear:
# rear
rear [Options] <command> [command options ...]
Relax & Recover Version 1.9.0 / 2010-11-19
Build: 61da7c0f0a63776d42385f085fb92930
Copyright (C) 2006-2010
        Schlomo Schapiro
        Gratien D'haese, IT3 Consultants
Relax & Recover comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details
see the GNU General Public License at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

Available Options:
-V                      version information
-d                      debug mode
-D                      debugscript mode
-S                      Step-by-step mode
-s                      Simulation mode (shows the scripts included)
-q                      Quiet mode
-r a.b.c-xx-yy          kernel version to use (current: 2.6.35.6-48.fc14.i686.PAE)

List of commands:
dump                    Dump configuration and system information
help                    print out usage
mkbackup                Create rescue media and backup system.
mkbackuponly            Backup system without creating a (new) rescue media.
mkdeb                   Create DEB packages with this rear version
mkdist                  Create distribution tar archive with this rear version
mkrescue                Create rescue media only
mkrpm                   Create RPM packages with this rear version
mktar                   Create tar archive with this rear installation
mkvendorrpm             Create vendor RPM with this rear version
recover                 Recover the system
validate                Submit validation information

To view/verify your configuration, run "rear dump". It will print out the
current settings for BACKUP and OUTPUT methods and some system information.

To create a new rescue environment, simply call "rear mkrescue". Do not forget
to copy the resulting rescue system away so that you can use it in the case of
a system failure. Use "rear mkbackup" instead if you are using the builtin 
backup functions (like NETFS)

To recover your system, start the computer from the rescue system and run 
"rear recover". Your system will be recovered and you can restart it and 
continue to use it normally.