How can I take Backup of my RHEL server
 

Dear All,
I want to take backup of my RHEL server so that in case any fault I can replace all setting correctly.

I am using squid,nis,samba on it.

Thanks All,
Please give me suggestion for that.
Thanks Again,

Rajendra

Hard ways of doing this:

dd - create an "image" of your whole harddisk (eats up time), so you can later simply use dd to put it back to a harddisk of the same size (well you can do it to a bigger one I guess, but it needs some tricking).

cpio - copy all the files into an archive that can be put back later.

I suggest cpio if you have files you need to save (Linux understands quite everything as "files"). Tar works the same way, but cannot include character special files, cpio should be able to do that too (as far as I know). dd gives you a perfect copy of the drive but you can only put it back as a whole; with cpio you can choose a bit.

There are probably..umm..more sophisticated methods, but I myself use cpio alot. dd I usually use only for small drives (usb thumb drives less than 1 gigabyte)..

The easiest (for me) for making backups are the "restore" and "dump" utilities.
Particularly, restore -i is wonderful for recovering those alone files you lose.

They also talk wonders about "amanda".

Red Hat Backup
 

This may be an old thread -- but I believe the question is still relevant and current. You can create a great Red Hat backup using the opensource ReaR (Relax And Recover).

Tutorial http://carroll.net/blog/red-hat-bare-metal-backup/

You can't, it's never been done before... but, I digress; searched, found:

Code:

---

rsync

---

have fun! :hattip:

This looks promising.

Yeah, but jamercee works for that company. And while their website is saying things, this duplicates several other projects such as

MondoArchive - http://www.mondorescue.org/index.shtml
Systemimager - https://github.com/finley/SystemImager/wiki

There are also others, but those two have been the best to work with that I know of.

I seem to recall testing this some time ago.
Didn't work - the recovery was a disaster. Can't remember the details, but reinforces the old mantra "check for yourself before betting the company on it".

Hi -- I see the comment that 'jamercee' works for the company. I do in fact work for Carroll-Net and we are a backup service provider. But Carroll-Net has no connection to the ReaR project (other than we are happy end users). We use the tool internally for imaging our own Red Hat servers, so we collected our notes together into an article to share.

If you haven't tried ReaR in a few years, you might to give it another shot. It is a world class toolset. The developers have done amazing stuff in the area of capturing filesystem layout. Even if it did nothing else for us, the filesystem capture would be enough details to guide us through creating a new system.

We also love pouring over the bash scripts ReaR has written. These guys are blackbelt ninja bash script experts. The code is simple, clean and documented -- which is the first time I have ever felt this way about ANY bash script. We've all created bash scripts to get things done -- but it's usually kept away from others out of embarasment and shame. These guys have done fantastic work.

Great, and glad it works for you. Was junk last time I looked at it, and since there are other tools that don't require much, if ANY bash scripting, I'll use them.

Thnx for these links. I'm in the market for something that will give me bare bone restore.

Hi jamercee, I tried to use ReaR but run into an issue. I'm trying to run this on a Gentoo system.

Hi Lazydog. I'm not familiar with Gentoo -- the article we shared was about Red Hat which is what we use it on. According to the ReaR website Gentoo 12.1 is supported (http://relax-and-recover.org/download/). What kind of trouble did you run into?

I think this is getting off topic to talk about Gentoo in a RH thread. But I haven't played with it much lately, I"m using dd right now to do full drive backups.