Relax and Recover (ReaR) (https://relax-and-recover.org) is an Open Source project, that was born in 2006 out of a single customers' need and a consulting project, to offer a cheaper and better alternative to a commercial disaster recovery product for Linux. Since then it has grown by many contributions to cover nearly any disaster recovery situation for Linux servers, desktops and laptops - and it is used in many data centres around the world. Red Hat and SUSE even provide commercial support, with their package maintainers also acting as ReaR maintainers. ReaR is the de-facto standard too for Linux bare metal restore and the only tool that leverages existing backups for disaster recovery purposes.

This talk by the founder and maintainer of ReaR gives an introduction to automating Linux disaster recovery, showing how to install, configure and use ReaR. From basics to advanced subjects around ReaR like design, architecture, development and extending it with custom code.

Finally, we also showcase ReaR as an Open Source project with nearly 20 years of experience and share our success and challenges going forward. We hope to encourage others to also publish solutions as Open Source and are happy to share our experience.

With all this success, we - the Open Source project - still struggle to provide regular releases, test automation or even good architecture documentation.

This talk by the founder and maintainer of ReaR introduces the tool, explores the reasons for these challenges and shows some of the approaches that work, and some that didn't work. I'll be happy for a conversation with other maintainers/projects about how they solve this problem.