Hi all,

I want to upgrade my web server to Fc5 from Fc4. The upgrade process, is fairly smooth, but I have customers on this box for email and 4 websites.

I want to be able to roll back my changes if the need arises. What sort of backup do you recommend?

Any ideas would be appreciated.

for systems with enough hd space, i always thought that copying the whole image of a partition is a good backup solution. this way you're sure you won't miss anything and also no more headaches thinking about what files to backup. you can use the dd command for this.

I have a spare drive, but it's bigger, will that work?

yes i guess. for a big spare drive there are two ways i know.

(a) you can create an image file using dd. for example then mount the image as loop note that you must at least make sure that the filesystem on your spare drive supports large files and its enough to handle the size of the image. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems.

(b) this one's easier and more common - create a new partition on the spare drive with the same partition size then use dd. for example Edit: Wait you mean the spare drive's bigger and not the partition to backup right?

Correct. The spare drive is a local drive that is 300G the drive I want to back up is 100G. The only issues I can see is the fact that my 100G has 2 partitions /boot and /. The / is a logical volume default fedora core 4 setup.

Can I take the entire 100G and back it to the 300G? I don't need to save anything on the 300G drive. Both drive are ext3.

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
114712996 10382028 98409792 10% /
/dev/hdc1 101086 14549 81318 16% /boot
/dev/shm 509516 0 509516 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdd 307666384 217261396 74776428 75% /backup

Does the fact that the / partition is a logical volume group cause any problems for using dd to create an image?

I figured I would create a /boot image and then the / image. /backup will be my target, I am moving the backups off this drive to the network.


Thanks,
Joe

I'm not sure about copying the entire drive. You might not be able to mount that.

I suggest you just create 2 patitions on your 300G with the sizes as the partition in the 100G then dd them. Remember not to delete any data from your 100G drive until you're sure you've backuped the data properly.

I'm also thinking.. if the total size of files in your 100G is not really that big, perhaps lesser than 10G, why not just 'cp -a' or 'rsync' them to your new drive? i'm not sure about using rsync though.

That's a good idea, I don't really need partition information. I am going to try some tests with it.

Thanks again Konsolebox