hi guys,

i want to back up my centos server that has a few virtual machines on it...i read that some people were saying dd is a very good way to do this. but a lot of people dont cause of fear of the command line.

i would like to write a script that backus up the entire hard drive to a ext usb hard drive.

i have a couple of questions though.

1) am i better off using a cloning software like acronis or storage craft.

2) can dd also restore a system to a bootable state or is it really just a backup.

3) can you still use the system while it is backing up?

thanks...

dd can be used to create a bit-by-bit image of a partition or an entire hard drive. If you restore such a backup to another drive/partition, it will be an exact copy of the original. If the original partition was bootable, the restored copy will be as well.

In general, people don't use dd for regular backup jobs. There are a number of reasons for this, such as these:

1. dd can only relate to the block device, not the filesystem contained therein. It copies the entire drive/partition, not just the parts containing actual data. The backup will take longer than it needs to, and will also contain all the unused parts of the drive/partition.
2. It's not possible to use dd to back up a partition or drive containing an active filesystem, if that filesystem is mounted read/write. As dd works its way form the beginning to the end of the drive/partition, the filesystem will be subject to changes and the copy will be inconsistent.

You can sort-of work around problem #1 by piping the data from dd through a compressor like gzip, but as time goes by, the drive/partition will contain an increasing amount of fragments from deleted/temporary files. This negatively affect your ability to compress the unused parts.

(Exception: If your drive is an SSD and the kernel sends "trim" commands to it whenever a file is deleted, the drive will usually just return zeroes if one tries to read a "free" block, and a block of zeroes will compress really well.)

The second issue affects every backup utility, not just dd. The only really good way to eliminate the problem is to dismount the filesystem or at least remount it as read-only (which obviously isn't an option for the root filesystem), or back up a read-only snapshot (requires LVM). Using snapshots means you can use the system while a backup is being performed, although you may experience slightly lower performance/responsiveness than usual.

You're probably better off using a generic backup tool rather than relying on dd. If you use something simple like tar or cpio but also create a small backup of the partition table (and you can certainly use dd to do this), it should be possible to restore the entire system to a bootable state from, say, a live CD/DVD/USB stick.

I think a lot of people use rsync to back up servers.

thanks for that...

rsync is used for file copying operations...not really for imaging / partition backups...am i right?

Correct, it can back up your filesystem & data, & does incremental backups also. If you had a catastrophic failure, you would have a recent back up of all your files to re install.

Clonezilla might be of interest if you really do want to back up your whole drive.

There is a commercial live copy software much like windows' shadow copy service.
That is the only way I know of to do live full backups.

Generally you don't need full backups. Your plan is what you like to do however. I tend to create a golden image of full install then once in a while copy off user data.

The vm's are pretty easy usually if you have an advanced vm. Depending on what is running on the vm you may or may not have to shut down fully.