magikman 4 Report post Posted October 13, 2007 Hello, This past week I started a new job with a rather large ISP maintaining their servers. One of the servers I have been put in charge of runs a captive portal system for a rather large convention center. This convention center has vendors come in and rent bandwidth/service. At this site I have two servers, one old and one current. As of right now there isn't any backing up of the current server, this scares me. What i would like to do is somehow clone the current server to the old and then use rsync to do incremental backups very early in the morning of the dynamic content on the drive. I was thinking of cloning the data on the HD of the current server via the use of dd or just tar'n all the directories. If using dd, i would just place the old server's drive in with the new server and dd the content to the old drive. However, if using tar and a custom script, i would just place the old drive in with the new server and tar the directories and untar them on the old drive leaving the MBR intact. If any of you have ever done anything like this, please let me hear how you accomplished this. Thanks!! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Insu 0 Report post Posted October 14, 2007 http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/ Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
magikman 4 Report post Posted October 14, 2007 Is that something you have actually used or is that something you pulled up from a google search? If you have actually used it, how did you use it? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Insu 0 Report post Posted October 14, 2007 I have used clonezilla to make clones from my filesystems for backup reasons. It worked perfectly. You should actually bother to read what that software can do from the websites. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
znx 24 Report post Posted October 14, 2007 My personal preference is to move toward something simple like rsync (as discussed on IRC). If you are simply cloning a part of the system, or a one of from a working system you can immediately clone it via ssh and nothing more. Another possibility (if you are making an image to multi-clone) would be partimage, which I have only used to backup my existing installs. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
magikman 4 Report post Posted October 16, 2007 I went against both of your suggestions and went with my own comfort. I ended up using dd to do the initial copy and rsync to do a nightly backup of the dynamic content on the server. All went really well. Thanks for your input, znx! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
