Backup Entire System

[ggggus]

I have an old Proliant 3000 in my basement that I use for backing up critical files from other computers too, as well as an asterisk at home (now Trixbox) server for my phones...so I'm running CentOS 4.3

I'm starting to run out of space on the 7 9.1Gb drives that I have RAID5'ed together into 1 logical drive. I went out and got some used 18.2Gb drives to double my capacity, rsync'ed the entire file system to another CentOS box that I have in my house that had the space, installed the new drives, installed centOS so I could rsync the files back to the new drives...and after doing this, I get kernel errors on boot.

I'm guessing that I'm approaching this from the wrong angle...and if you know a lot about linux, you can probably tell that I know just enough to be dangerous at this point..but not much more. How to I restore my system back exactly as it came off the old drives?

***************************************
J. Jacobs

http://www.piercedmedia.com

 

[QatQat]

I gather you are using rsync, but what exactly are you copying across from the old box? If you rsync user spaces only, you should not get kernel errors; are you trying to rsync the whole filesystem? if so, your system would be installed and up and running by the time you try and restore everything, therefore would complain loudly if you replace all system files. probably you should use tar to backup the whole system and restore the tarball as a root user on the new machine or even log in as single user.

also, are you migrating to the same linux distro/version?

Cheers

QatQat



Life is what happens when you are making other plans.

 

[ggggus]

I am migrating to the same distro and version... infact, asside from the size of the logical drive, I want everything to stay exactly as is.

I've used tar for files that I've download, and need to install, but I'm really sure what it does. What makes tarball different from rsync? and how I use it to back up my file system and then re-install it?

to answer your question about what files, I was rsync'ing every directory except /proc and /sys

I'm not sure what is in every folder, or if it's ok to rysinc other folders like /mnt, /media, /initrd, and others.

I tried just restorying /var, /src, and /home and not all programs ran when i rebooted. I'm assuming one of these folders is bad to rsync.

***************************************
J. Jacobs

http://www.piercedmedia.com

 

[QatQat]

your programs usually run from /bin /sbin /usr,

rsync is different from tar simply because if something/some daemon does not like to be overwritten at normal runlevel, you may restore the tarball logging in as single user. rsync needs at least runlevel 3 on rpm based distros and runlevel 2 on debian (network levels).


Cheers

QatQat

Life is what happens when you are making other plans.