Mondo Rescue is free

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 disaster recovery

Disaster recovery

Disaster recovery is the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity...

 software. It supports Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 (i386, x86-64

X86-64

x86-64 is an extension of the x86 instruction set. It supports vastly larger virtual and physical address spaces than are possible on x86, thereby allowing programmers to conveniently work with much larger data sets. x86-64 also provides 64-bit general purpose registers and numerous other...

, IA-64) and FreeBSD

FreeBSD

FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...

 (i386). It's packaged for multiple distributions (Red Hat

Red Hat

Red Hat, Inc. is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....

, RHEL

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux-based operating system developed by Red Hat and targeted toward the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86, x86-64, Itanium, PowerPC and IBM System z, and desktop versions for x86 and x86-64...

, Fedora

Fedora (operating system)

Fedora is a RPM-based, general purpose collection of software, including an operating system based on the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat...

, CentOS

CentOS

CentOS is a free operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux . It exists to provide a free enterprise class computing platform and strives to maintain 100% binary compatibility with its upstream distribution...

, OpenSuSE, SLES

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a Linux distribution supplied by SUSE and targeted at the business market. It is targeted for servers, mainframes, and workstations but can be installed on desktop computers for testing as well. New major versions are released at an interval of 3-4 years, while...

, Mandriva

Mandriva Linux

Mandriva Linux is a Linux distribution distributed by Mandriva. It uses the RPM Package Manager...

, Debian

Debian

Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...

, Ubuntu

Ubuntu (operating system)

Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...

, Gentoo

Gentoo Linux

Gentoo Linux is a computer operating system built on top of the Linux kernel and based on the Portage package management system. It is distributed as free and open source software. Unlike a conventional software distribution, the user compiles the source code locally according to their chosen...

). It also supports tapes, disks, USB devices, network and CD/DVD as backup media, multiple filesystems, LVM

Logical volume management

In computer storage, logical volume management or LVM provides a method of allocating space on mass-storage devices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning schemes...

, software and hardware RAID

RAID

RAID is a storage technology that combines multiple disk drive components into a logical unit...

. Restoration may be done from a physical media including OBDR tape support, or CD/DVD/USB media, or from the network through PXE

Preboot Execution Environment

The Preboot eXecution Environment is an environment to boot computers using a network interface independently of data storage devices or installed operating systems.PXE was introduced as part of the Wired for Management framework by Intel and is described in the specification The Preboot...

.

As mentioned by the FSF, "The emphasis is on stability and ease of use". According to Ohloh, MondoRescue development is worth more than $6M.

Mondo uses its own Linux distribution called Mindi to provide a favorable post boot environment for performing data restore. Unlike other disk clone solutions there is no ready to use Live CD provided by Mondo Rescue, instead, the included mindi package will create a custom turn-key Live CD/DVDs using the exact Linux kernel and configuration of the system being backed up. In effect, this bootable DVD/CD is customized to the computer being backed up; the objective being to reduce the possibility of having missing device drivers or kernel incompatibilities that may arise from using a generic (vanilla) linux kernel in a pre-built Live DVD/CD.

The MondoRescue project uses the continuous packaging approach brought by http://project-builder.org to deliver regular packaged beta of the project at ftp://ftp.mondorescue.org/test

External links

• Framasoft article on MondoRescue
• A french Web page about MondoRescue