A Simple System Back-Up Suggestion?
 

I'm running RedHat ES 4 as a test server for web development. I am relatively new at administering a Linux Server on my own, having relied on trained professionals at third parties in the past.

I am looking fo a painless :-) way to back-up the operating system once I have it configured. I have the local network working, as well as Perl and MySQL. I am planning on loading Tomcat and the Java JVM to run Java Server Pages.

What I'm looking for is a way to save the system in a given state so I can reload it in the event of a drive failure. I don't believe that I need a mirror of the system, as this seems like it may be a little more difficult to set-up. I would be happy with a solution that required me to re-install the operating system, then overwrite the system files with the back-ups that I made. This is the gist of my question...

If I copy file system folders to another drive (I added another hard-drive to the box to be used for back-up) with the intent of using these to restore the configuration of my server, can I overwrite a newly installed file system with these folders and expect my server to be in the state that it was in when the back-ups were made?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Bob

You have 2 easy options. If the drives are the same size, you can do software RAID between them, so the 2nd disk is a copy of the first. Even easier is to set up the wonderful http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/to backup whatever you tell it to backup. Of course, the backuppc solution can only run on a linux box, so if you only have 1, it is backing itself up, and fdoesn't help much in the even of a catastrophic failure, but if you just want the ability to restore yesterday's files over todays, it rocks. I deploy that all over.

Peace,
JimBass

RAID is not a backup solution. You accidently delete a file from your disk, and it's gone from the mirror too. RAID mirroring is designed to keep a system running if a disk goes bad on you. You can't "restore from a RAID backup".
No problem. This type of restore is done all the time. Check out the "rsync" command. You may also want to read up on the "system identity backup" concept, as described by Marcel Gagne here: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5328 You will probably need to buff up the sample script and add things specific to your system that Marcel does not mention.