Re: Backing up a running system
On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 22:02:00 +1100, Robert S <robert_s@emailme.net.au> wrote:
> >> 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.
>
IIRC "dump" has limits, like working only with ext2 fs. Recalled
another tool that you can check, AMANDA, in Debian amanda-common
amanda-client amanda-server...
Andrea
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