Rick Lim wrote:
Hi there,
Could anyone recommend a backup software that would back up the whole
system, what I am looking for is much like Ghost for Linux but the
system has to keep running.
I am not worried about log files, this is the case where if the machine
fails then we are down for the period of time it takes to either build a
new OS disk and reinstall all of the custom programs and their numerous
quirks or grab the latest restore from the back media and just ‘clone’ a
new disk with all the programs setup.
What I have tried in the past is to clone the harddisk using the
harddisk upgrade howto method, but that involves taking the machine
completely offline, also cutting an image with Ghost means taking the
machine offline.
Thanks.
Depending on the file system that you have(ext2,ext3....)
I would recommend dump or cpio. If you have a tape drive
attached (lets say /dev/st0) you can use the following
dump command:
dump 0uf /dev/st0 /
This will dump the entire contents of the / file system
to the tape drive.
You can then restore from tape with the command restore.
Restore has a flag 'i' which tells it to use interactive
mode so that you can choose individual files if needed or
'x' which says to restore everything.
restore if /dev/st0 (interactive mode)
or
restore xf
The flag 'f' stands for file/device, this means that you
can also dump to a file if needed (just replace /dev/st0
with the name of the file you wish to dump to.
dump can also be used to to incremental backups as well.
dump 2uf /dev/st0 / will backup only those files which
have changed since the last level 0. The number can be
anything from 0-9. Any number higher than 0 will backup
files changed since the last lower number backup.
Mike
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