Re: Backing up a running system
>> 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)?
>
> A backup is easily done with dd, for example:
> dd if=/dev/sda1 bs=1M | gzip -c9 > /media/usbdrive/sda1.bin.gz
>
> 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.
>
Thanks for the speedy answer. I have a feeling that /etc/mtab gave some
problems with this approach. Has anybody tried this?
The advantage of gzip is that the files can be easily browsed with a Windows
machine (which make up most of our office computers). Its also easy for
people with limited knowledge to understand!!
Is there any advantage to using dump? I noticed on the FreeBSD docs that
they recommended it for mirroring a hard drive. I've never used it before.
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