I want to have a back up of a debian OS with all of its service and its configuration and all of information. Is there any way to have it so that I can restore all of that again as a OS and its information!?

Use tar command witch -p option. Tar only persistent directories or required ones.

The one piece of information that tar doesn't backup is the boot sectors.

If you DO ever restore the backup, you have to use an emergency or live system; and after the restore you have to reinstall your boot blocks before you can boot the restored system.

You might have a look at Clonezilla. I don't personally bother, though. I have kickstart (FAI would work for Debian) configuration files to rebuild cluster machines and then puppet rules that handle installation and configuration of software. Source code is kept in a backed-up git repository for easy re-cloning. To me this is easier than maintaining a bunch of different disk images, but it might be overkill for one or a few servers.

I have a centos 6.5 server set up, I found the easiest way to backup with peace of mind is to clone your hard drive.

I connect a second hard drive to my system "the one I want to clone too". Same size as original source hard drive in my case 2TB drives.


I boot off of a Knoppix 7.2 live cd. I start a terminal session as su

then I type:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

DON'T MIX THIS UP!!!! MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHICH DRIVE IS THE SOURCE AND WHICH IS THE TARGET

if=/dev/sda : Input disk (source)
of=/dev/sdb : Output disk (destination)

It takes approx 5 hours so I start the clone before I plan on going to bed

It works every time. I test it by booting off the clone drive.

I have successfully cloned the same size hard drives while linux was running from a terminal with the above command.
but it is safer if you just do the cloning from the live cd since both drives will be unmounted.

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