Re: Backing up a running system
Hi,
On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Robert S wrote:
> I have a debian (woody) server running at work and would like to back up the
> entire system onto some sort of removable media (USB hard drive, DVD,
> removable harddrive etc). I do daily backups of /etc and /home using tar,
> but would like to be able to restore my system quickly in the event of a
> disaster. I don't change things much on my system, so I'd only need to do
> this once every 6 months or so.
>
> To date I've been using partimage - but that requires that the partition
> being backed up is unmounted. I've done a bit of googling, but haven't
> found something that fits the bill.
>
> Is there a way of doing this (preferably remotely) without unmounting the
> filesystem (like the new version of Norton Ghost is able to do in Windows)?
>
I would write an image from the partitions. If you have no 'spare' disks
in the computer, or only one partition you have to mount a remote drive
directly, like USB, Samba, or similar.
A backup is easily done with dd, for example:
dd if=/dev/sda1 bs=1M | gzip -c9 > /media/usbdrive/sda1.bin.gz
This backs up the partition, zips it and writes it to a removable drive.
When restoring you might run into some discontinuities with files which
were open during the backup, but as long as these are logfiles, it
shouldn't be a big problem. Just make sure you closed all importand files
(if any) before backing up this way.
Restoring the image is almost the same:
gunzip -c /media/usbdrive/sda1.bin.gz | dd of=/dev/sda1 bs=1M
Cheers,
Sebastiaan
--
English written by Dutch people is easily recognized by the improper use of 'In principle ...'
The software box said 'Requires Windows 95 or better', so I installed Linux.
Als Pacman in de jaren '80 de kinderen zo had be?nvloed zouden nu veel jongeren rondrennen
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