[K12OSN] Backing up a server...best methods

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2004-11-17 at 21:40, Robert Arkiletian wrote:
> What about buying a removable ide drive bay ($40) and a 200GB ide drive 
> (~$120). Make partitions on it of the size of your scsi drive 
> partitions. Then use dd to copy it over. Then if the scsi drives get 
> borked/crash just use Toms Root Boot (which has fdisk, dd, mke2fs, 
> mkswap) to copy things back onto new scsi drives. After this you may 
> have to use Knoppix to run grub/lilo to setup the master boot record.

This would work, but for an image copy you should shut the system
down and boot from CD so the contents don't change during the
copy.  However if you are going to do partitions separately and
have to fiddle to make the drive bootable, you might as well
use tar or rsync to make the copies.  And if you use backuppc
to automate the process you can keep a copy of every day for the
past week or more on line so you can get back files even if you
don't notice they are missing immediately.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com