paging the linux backup experts

I have a little server (macmini, powerpc, ubuntu server based) at home
that I'm now quite attached to. It does email, dhcp, webserver all that
kind of stuff. It's taken me quite a long time to get it just right, but
I don't have a decent backup of it.

Taking the HD out is quite a pain due to the case design.

What's the best way to take an image backup of the whole disk such that
it would just boot from the copy if I needed it to?

Free is good.

tia

 

Carbon cloner
http://mac-free.com/download/Carbon-Copy-Cloner.html
or use time machine....

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USB HDD caddy, then "rsync -Rcax / [mountpoint]" for the copying. The
'c' makes it checksum everything, you can omit it most of the time and
it'll be faster.

You could muck around with dd to get a disk image, but frankly you're
just copying stuff you don't need to.

You will need to do some fiddling with boot loaders to get it to boot
off the second disk if you ever need to.

 

"ubuntu server"

 

So as I suspected, I'll need to get into the case for this.

dd worries me in that it doesn't error check very well IIRC?

hmmm fiddling = bad. It will of course always happen at the worst
possible time.

 

No, I mean buy a spare HDD and then a USB caddy to put it in. This means
you can treat it as your backup drive, plug it into the back via USB.

If the internal HDD fails, you do the same process in the opposite
direction.

I presume you are using something like Boot Camp to partition your
system in Mac OS X and Ubuntu?

You're unlikely to have an error that can't be caught by fsck, however
if you're really concerned you could md5 checksum the partition and the
image that you create using something like

# cat /dev/sda1 | openssl md5

You're probably right!

 

My preference would be to use partimage, otherwise it's old fashioned
"disc images using dd" [1]

You need to boot from an Ubuntu or alternative Linux livecd [2][3]

Hopefully the powerpc livecd on Mac mini allows you to mount a large
external usb drive for the backup images or mount a drive over the
network to another pc.

If clonezilla [4] was available for powerpc I'd suggest that.


[1] http://help.ubuntu.com/community/DriveImaging
[2] http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/10.04/release/
[3] http://mac.linux.be/content/apple-powerpc-wiki
[4] http://clonezilla.org/

 

So I can rsync from a 'live' system disk (no open file issues - if I
shut down mysql I should be ok?)

OSX is no more - it's just a pure Ubuntu disk - not sure which boot
loader it uses, whatever came with the PPC build.

I know I am!

Thanks for the pointers.

 

Ah this is what I suspected. I'll those links - thank you.

 

Simon Wilson escribió:

Mondo.

 

Probably that's a good idea, yes. If you were a bank or whatever I'd be
recommended additional paranoia but you're not.

yaboot, probably.

Having looked at the specs for that I'd probably recommend booting from
the PPC live CD and doing a dd copy. The alternative is a lot of faffing
around with mac-fdisk.

 

Looks interesting.

Have you tried it, and successfully recovered from it?

 

*doh*

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Catman MIB#14 SKoGA#6 TEAR#4 BOTAFOF#38 Apostle#21 COSOC#3
Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright (Remove rust to reply)
116 Giulietta 3.0l Sprint 1.7 GTV TS GT 3.2 V6
Triumph Sprint ST 1050: It's blue, see.
www.cuore-sportivo.co.uk

 

Simon Wilson escribió:

I use it now and again to back up. Never had cause to test its ability to
restore, but there's a very active mailing list where you can ask for
assurances:

 

Doesn't look like there's a PowerPC version though.

 

I simply tar the root directory but exclude certain parts that I obviously
don't need. If the worst happens, I'll put in a new disc, install Ubuntu,
then untar from the backup copy which lives on a NAS.

 

Use rsync.

I exclude directories in a file and use --exclude-from= argument which
points to a file containing this:

/proc
/dev
/var/run/
/sys
/media
/tmp


These file may vary according to distro but should be okish for
Ubuntu.


To restore (yes, I have) do a vanilla install and rsync back.

 

Any use ...

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=clonezilla