Ubuntu Server 10.4.1 Automated Full Backup
 

Hi guys,
This is my first post and I am a linux newbie.. took on the challenge of setting up an ubuntu server with proxy and firewall with vpn access as well.. sounds good?

While messing with things, I installed ebox server, know called Zentyal and perform backups, however, when performing a full restore, following instructions and all it does not restore correctly. I ran many attempts with verious configurations and still allways got some errors, such as eboc-ebackup failing to start, etc. most noteably wa sthe ldap error, which i figured out how to fix by restarting once logged into and then rebooting.

I say the Clonezilla options for a full backup, and it sounds great, but does require me to perform a full abckup, while bring the server down to perform.

What I wanted to know, was what do you recommend for performing a full backup (possibly to NTFS partition or USB key with FAT32) with automation or even if i had to perform the trigger, just without needing to bring the server down, so when i go into production i dont have any issues backing up anytime?

Thanks for your assistance.

raj.

rsync is a good option

You could indeed see if rsync would do the trick. You can take incremental backups with it if you like (see something like this), but in any case I do not recommend taking backups to NTFS volumes nor FAT. NTFS is not a native filesystem to Linux and while support for it is nowadays commonly included into distributions, I don't recommend using it if it's not a must. FAT32 (not to mention the older ones) can't hold big files and it doesn't have a clue about permissions the way Linux-native filesystems (for example ext3) have, and therefore you're going to run into problems at some point. When taking backups you generally want to copy them in "archive" mode, preserving permissions and so on, and FAT just doesn't do that. I'm not sure about NTFS, never cared to look at it that much. Put short, use the same filesystem for your backup media that you use for your production server, and you're probably good. If you don't think your production server filesystem is as "good" as your backup media filesystem, perhaps consider changing it as well.

Even with rsync (alone) you can't probably acieve a situation where you can just point and click to have a system restored completely while it's still running. For recovering some files it's ok, but if your system is in a condition where you'll need to perform a 100% restore from a backup media, you probably are going to put it off line for a moment. Maybe you should have a look at RAID (disk mirroring) as well?