best way to backup/restore os drive? fc4

[prophotodx]

What is the best way to backup an os drive? I have two identical servers (almost, except for samba shares) and I could easily just backup one and if an os drive fails I could restore.

What is the best way to restore this?

be easy on the noobie...

DBX
(Try it my way, it might work...)

 

[QatQat]

Well, a raw but easy way to do that is to create a big tarball of the whole OS drive

tar -cvpf myOSDrive.tar /

will save the whole drive in a tarball called myOSdrive which will be dumped on the directory where you are executing it from.

if you are concerned about space

tar -cvpzf myOSDrive.tar.gz /

will do the same but will compress it as well; obviously you will be paying a price in terms of time of execution.


tar -zxvpf myOSDrive.tar.gz --directory /

will restore it on your new, empty installation, keeping everything like before, including file permissions.
It will overwrite all existing files, so make sure that the new installation is really empty.


The problem with the tar approach is that, in case of system crash, you will need to re-install linux before being able to restore your tarball. So it is not an immediate disaster recovery solution.
Yet, if 100% uptime is not vital, then tar is a valid and inexpensive option, it can be scripted easily to peform a full backup and put it on a separate network resource and more.



OTherwise, why not look into cloning your drive onto another, possibly removable?

if you do not want to use commercial software (i.e. ghost) you could look into using "dd",

here is a good article

http://www.rajeevnet.com/hacks_hints/os_clone/os_cloning.html

Cheers

QatQat

Life is what happens when you are making other plans.

 

[NDeters]

My organization recently had to approach this scenario for a 5 node cluster. Our solution was to use the product called SystemImager. You can download the software from

http://www.systemimager.org/.

It is a free imaging solution for linux.

We used a SAN share to store the images, so that if the machine that is acting as the server goes down, we can convert any other node of the cluster to act as the server in a few steps. SystemImager will create a copy of the data and store the information about filesystems etc. for easy restore. The restore process is to boot off of CD and to put in the information for the image you want to restore and where the SystemImager server is.

SystemImager is also very good for replicating a server onto new nodes. If you add more servers to your location, you can have SystemImager change the name and IP address of the server, so that after you run the 'restore' onto the new machine, it will be a new node.