Best way of backing up entire system?

[B3M]

Hi

I have made some customization and installed some extra software. Now, this was time consuming and I don’t want to have to do it all from scratch again.

What is the best way of backing-up the entire system? and restoring it?

On a system with a CD-ROM I would run my usual backup script (see below) to generate backups, and then start the system from a LiveDisk, mount the host file system and extract the backup.txz archive onto it. The B3 does not have a CD-ROM so I am not sure how I would restore my backups.

Code: Select all

cat backup.lst |
xargs tar lcfv /backup/system.txz --xz 2> /backup/system.err |
tee /backup/system.log 1> /dev/null

/
--exclude=/backup/*.txz
--exclude=/home/storage/extern/*
--exclude=/proc/*
--exclude=/sys/*
--exclude=/tmp/*
--exclude=/var/lock/*
--one-file-system

(My script uses xz compression. About 58% saving on gzip for the out-of-box B3 system.)

[Cheeseboy]

Hi B3M,

I use the boot USB stick http://update.excito.net/install/latest/b3/, modified to to not reinstall the system (look in bubba.cfg) to boot up the b3.
Then I use dd to make an image of the /dev/sda1 partition.
I've never had to restore such an image though, so I cannot vouch for the reliability of this method.

Any other ideas out there?

Cheers,

Cheeseboy

[RandomUsername]

I looked into a way of using Clonezilla from a USB stick for this but I didn't get very far. I might revisit it again at some point.

[B3M]

So basically no one has good practises for backing up their full system?

[RandomUsername]

So basically no one has good practises for backing up their full system?

The problem is that creating an iage means taking the server offline. Forthos of us running mail/web servers that's not really an option.

[B3M]

I’ve got my email, and now also a password vault on this thing. But I don’t really have a good emergency recovery/back-up plan. Which is why I’m curious about how other back-up their configuration and data.