Making an offline image of partitions to USB drive
I just finished installing a fairly complicated setup on a RHEL 3 AS machine. Now that it works, I would like to take a snapshot of my drive to an external USB HD. I do a similar thing with BartPE and Driveimage XML on my windows boxes, but my standalone boot CD doesnt recognize the RAID controller in this IBM x3550 appliance. And I am not sure it would recognize the ext3 partitions. The whole of the system is less that 300 GB.
Ideally, I would shutdown my running server, hook up the external USB HD, boot in some kind of recue mode maybe? Some way that the production system would not be accessed so no files would be busy. Then mount the USB drive, and dd or something the 2 partitions to the external drive. (/boot and /) Can anyone advise? I started looking at Amanda, but it seems a tad complicated for my single machine. There is no room for another HD in the server, it is in a rack, but I can go up to it, connect the external HD, and reboot the box while in front of it and see the boot, etc. |
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I use BootitNG exclusively myself. It makes compressed images containing only allocated data, not deleted or un-allocated space making the image smaller. DD makes an image of an entire partition containing every sector.
You can still make compressed images with DD also. |
Or part image will do it for you to.
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Good start
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I've also received suggestions for FOG (aka FreeGhost) and MondoRescue. I burned the G4L ISO and am going to experiment with it. Documentation is sort of hard to come by, or am I missing something? More details about my setup: The external HD is currently formatted as NTFS and already has files on it, but has a lot of room left. I am not sure what the dump of my source disk would look like on this, assuming it works. Would it be 1 big file? 3 Files (1 per partition)? It would be great if I could just come up with a setup whereby if needed, I could hook up the external HD on which I did a backup to the system, boot from a G$L CD, then restore everything to a (presumably) new HD and then reboot the box and see it come up like it was when I did the backup. I dont care or mind if it copies useless stuff like the content of the swap partition, as long as I am able to easily recreate everything easily from my backup. I suppose less desirable but not out of the question would be to reinstall the OS from my RHEL CDs, specifying the partition layout (including a swap file), then restore my data (from /boot and / backup) as a two-step process... |
Hum... 4GB limit?
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Kewl! (Once you get to know it)
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So I expect I I got a disk crash, or wanted to replace the two 70GB HD hardware-raid into 1 logical 140GB drive with 2 140GB drives set up in mirroring RAID, then I would be able to do this by replacing the drives, doing the RAID type switch with the RAID controller, then reinstalling my RHEL from the 4 original CDs, making sure to request the same partitioning setup. Then use BinG to copy over the stuff from my backup to the system, right? This is getting exciting! Too bad I dont happen to have other fancy SAS drives to test the process at this moment. |
Close but no cigar it looks like
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Can you expand on that a little bit?
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Will g4l recognize a previously-formatted NTFS drive?
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And yes, because it compresses it, your backup file size is smaller. My typical Linux OS fresh installation image size ia around 800MB, Windows XP a little over 2GB, Windows Media Center is over 4GB with all updates applied. If you have personal data also, it goes up in size. |
PartImage Rulz!
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The only thing I havent tried is the restore, but I have 95% confidence it will work! Thank you Thank you Thank you ! |
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