bootable backups

[William Park]

On Sat, Jun 05, 2010 at 01:35:51PM -0400, Darryl Moore wrote:
> I'm looking into local backup solutions.
> 
> Specifically what I want is to be able to backup some of my servers to a
> live CD or live USB so that if there is ever an issue with the server I
> can reboot it, (or another machine) from the CD and immediately bring
> the machine back online.
> 
> Obviously this may not work work for servers which use a lot of disk
> space, but for DNS/DHCP, asterisk, or routers, this could be really
> useful
> 
> So far all I've seen that appears to be capable of this is remastersys
> and bubackup. The problem with both of these is that they require
> Xwindows, which none of my servers are running.
> 
> Does any one know of any simple scripts I can run from bash which will
> do this? Preferably without unmounted my root partition so that I don't
> have to take the server offline first.

If the original source is harddisk, then backing up to another harddisk
would make sense.  For that, you just have to "copy" that harddisk.

Eg.  Given "sda" is original harddisk, and "sdb" is backup disk,
    mount /dev/sdb /mnt
    rsync -aHxv --delete / /mnt
Just use whatever booting method you use, to make it bootable.  For
simple setup, using "DOS" method of "active partition" is the easiest.
I'm familiar with LILO, but not with GRUB.

-- 
William

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