[nflug] Backup Questions?

Cyber Source peter at thecybersource.com
Fri Oct 20 14:14:57 EDT 2006


Michael James wrote:
> If I have a linux system, and want to create an exact backup on another 
> machine...is it as simple at tar the root dir and subdirs, transfer tarball 
> to a newly installed linux system (assuming same version) and untar the 
> tarball at the root level?  I have a production system that beginning to act 
> up hardware wise, so I'd like to have a spare in reserve.  This is not a real 
> time backup, as in replication or clustering.  I just need to duplicate the 
> original linux system to a different box without spending hours or days 
> reconfiguring  or reinstalling the system or software.  Are there certain 
> directories that shouldn't be overwritten?  Any caveats? Suggestions?
>
> Michael R. James
> jamesm at thundertux.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> nflug mailing list
> nflug at nflug.org
> http://www.nflug.org/mailman/listinfo/nflug
>
>   
You could grab an extra hard drive of at least the required size and 
then "dump" it to the new hard drive. Recreate your partitions, mount 
both the original and new partitions with a rescue cd of some sort (or 
other ways too). Then tar one to the other. We do it here to replicate 
our "tweaked" OS's, saved tons of time. Let's say you have the original 
mounted at /mnt/orig and the new at /mnt/disk. To transfer it over with 
tar, you could do this "tar -cf - .|(cd /mnt/disk && tar -xf -)". You 
would then have an exact copy of what was on /mnt/orig on /mnt/disk. 
Edit fstab's accordingly, create new initrd and your good to go.
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