The Relax-and-Recover (ReaR) Open Source project exists since 2006 and is now the de-facto standard for automated Linux Disaster Recovery, shipping with all Linux distros.

A behind-the-scenes look of how such a project works for such a long time, what goes well and what could be better.

ReaR was born out of a single custmers' need and a consulting project, to offer a cheaper and better alternative to a commercial disaster recovery product. Since then it has grown by many contributions to cover nearly any disaster recovery situation for Linux servers and desktops - 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.

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

This talk explores the reasons for that 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.