I recently lost a boot drive out of one of my boxes and I am looking for a way to make a copy of my new one. So that If I lost my current one I could plug in my backup hard drive and poof all is back to normal. I've searched around for ways to do this and haven't come up with what I am looking for. A raid would work although I'd like to just have the drive sitting on a shelf (in a safe to be more specific) just waiting for something to go wrong. Anyone have any ideas on how to make this work? Still testing a few different things but was hoping someone had a way to do this fairly easy. Thanks in advance...

We have done the following setup to backup our mail server in the department.
1. Took an exactly similar hard disk and dumped the server hd on it.
2. Connected the hd to another m/c and setup rsync on it.
3. Setup a cronjob to ping the server and if the server is down, it will just replace the lilo.conf file with another one, run lilo and reboot. This will boot the backup harddisk.
--Sarin

how are you going about dumping the hd to a backup drive? I'm just looking for an exact copy of the server hd to keep in the safe so if the one in it where to fail that i could grab it out of the safe and plug it in, boot up and all is well. Just having a hard time figuring how to get that copy with all the same partitions and all. Thanks

Anyone have a good way of doing this? It is possible with a Raid 1 and then just taking the second drive out and placing it on the shelf. Although I'm not to fond of doing it this way. If I could find out how to dump it to another HD that would be ideal.

No good way of doing this?

Still no ideas on this one?