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Full Disk Drive Backup


deed02392
21-08-2011, 01:27
I use tar with gzip to make backups currently. It runs on a cron job and I occaisionally get e-mails saying that files were changed during the backup, hence the backup fails. As such I get the feeling that it isn't the ideal way to backup files. I now use rsync, which SSH's in from a remote machine and performs the backup back to it.

Would tar really be an appropriate solution for making a backup copy of my entire system? Or should I set up another Linux server here at home which could SSH into my OVH server and perform a system backup with that? I'm trying to get an idea of a reliable full system backup, not to perform an exact restore from, but to have in at least a format I can use to refer to for configuration and files as and when I realise they're needed.

Thanks a lot.

Myatu
20-08-2011, 23:49
You can certainly do this on an active server, bar a few exceptions (ie, MySQL database, of which you should backup a "dump" instead of its database files). Windows is a bit fussy regarding exclusive file locks, but there are some decent backup solutions that can deal with this (ie., by using a shadow copy).

On Linux there are various ways creating a backup of files. Most commonly used are TAR archive files, which would be similar to ZIP files. You can use the "tar" program to output the file contents directly to a remote location, instead of a file on the server itself. Thus you could upload it directly to OVH's FTP location or your home SFTP for example, which avoids requiring free disk space the size of the final backup file -- just be sure to perform a verify on the backup file, to ensure it was transferred properly.

Look at "man tar" for various options to exclude files / directories. Also Google "tar pipe ftp backup" for some examples or scripts for automating backups.

deed02392
20-08-2011, 13:16
A full copy could be sufficient, is this achievable while the server is online then? It would probably be more convenient to deal with an image file though, than thousands of files, as this causes fragmentation and relatively slow copying speeds.

Myatu
29-07-2011, 19:26
Do you really need a sector-for-sector clone? Or is a full copy sufficient?

deed02392
28-07-2011, 18:45
I am looking to create a full disk image of my Kimsufi dedicated server. How can I go about doing this? Looking for advice from other customers.

Have looked into it and seen potential candidates such as clonezilla, such that I could clone the drive directly to my home connection via SFTP. How would I go about booting into clonezilla from the OVH server manager interface, though?

Thanks in advance,
George