Re: How do I back up a running system?
On Fri, 18 Jun 2010, Robert S wrote:
I have debian running on a "headless" system. I'd like to back the entire
system up. Its difficult with a bootable disk without a monitor (so
Clonezilla etc are out). I've tried mondoarchive but it usually bails out
before it completes the backup.
Hi Robert. If you're using the XFS filesystem then xfsdump is guaranteed
to provide consistent backups even if used on a read-write mounted
filesystem. This has been confirmed by the developers several times in
public and is consistent with my own DR tests.
If you're using another filesystem then you could consider using LVM
snapshots.
Quite a lot of backup utils are LVM snapshot aware and can use this
feature if available.
Are there any suggestions? A simple script would be nice.
I use custom backup scripts in a lot of places. I suppose they would be
described as fairly complex.
The backup server sshes to the server to be backed up, executes the backup
command (xfsdump, tar, whatever) and streams the data over the network via
STDOUT. On the other end of the link the data is captured and written to
the filesystem as a backup. Backups of Unix filesystems have been done
this way for decades (using rsh rather than ssh in the old days of
course).
I go in to a little more detail about this in my backup talk:
http://www.timetraveller.org/talks/backup_talk.pdf
Cheers,
Rob
--
Email: robert@timetraveller.org Linux counter ID #16440
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