don't know how to backup server?? newbie
 

I am trying to backup my server. I am not sure how to do it? I have backed up all my web files that are in /var/www/html & /home/user/public_html. I am using Fedora Core 4. I have a primary master harddrive. I have a primary slave harddrive that is all empty. So, how do I mount the primary slave hd and use the dd comand to back up the whole OS. How do I use the dd comand? I have never done this before. what other ways are there to do backups on servers? I am a total newbie at this. First time for everything.

thanks in advance :)

The primary master is /dev/hda, the primary slave is /dev/hdb

use fdisk -l to see the partitions.

There are many ways to use an additional hard drive as a backup - following is the most basic:

fdisk (man fdisk) can be used to format hdb if it isn't already.
lets say you make one big partition, hda1, which is ext3.
you also make a mountpoint, say, /mnt/bak, to put it.
Then all you need to do is: mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /mnt/bak (man mount)

Now you have tons of space in /mnt/bak to keep stuff in.

(You can make an entry in /etc/fstab so this drive will mount when you boot - but, as it is a backup, you may only want it mounted when you are actually storing or retreaving files.)

You will want to archive your system into /mnt/bak (man tar) ... what you want to keep is up to you. You could archive the entire file system if you wanted.

The entire process can be written to a script which is run as a cron job. (man crontab)

If you want /dev/hdb to be a mirror copy of /dev/hda, then you want to look at RAID.

So... what sort of backup strategy were you thinking of?