I am dealing with rivendell which is currently running the entire system in our radio station. Obviously if I attempt to back up the system a reboot will be required which will take us off air. Which is fine as long as I find the perfect time to do so. How might someone go about backing up the entire system to an external drive??

There is no reason for a backup to require a reboot unless you are planning to do something like clone the installation with Clonezilla or a similar tool. I would advise doing more research before proceeding.

The simplest solution would be to use something like rsync to back up crucial files; figuring out rsync, though, is not necessary simple because the command offers many arguments and options; it took me several hours before I found the combination that worked for me. There is a GUI for rsync that has been well reviewed by Sourcetrunk called Back in Time.

Since Rivendell uses MySQL, you should investigate how to maintain, export, and backup MySQL databases. WordPress has a good introduction to that.

A quick search for "backup rivendell" turned up this.

There are both commercial and free backup solutions. There is even a commercial live state backup solution that may suite your needs. You'd kind of need to know how long it might take to clone this off. You may not have time for a long process. Acronis may be a choice. I'd consider dd but that is a bit advanced to get best results and you can destroy your data. Use something safe.

[QUOTE=brnschr;4721569]I am dealing with rivendell which is currently running the entire system in our radio station. How might someone go about backing up the entire system to an external drive??

You probably have a mixing table at studio, so that "Offline" part should not happen if you can save few GB of mp3 to a USB MP3 player and plug it in, if you have news on the hour your technician can turn the knob to silence it.
In the meantime you take Clonezilla and put a CD into your computer and you can restart it and make a clone to USB drive.

Your next step should be then configuring some "live" backup with rsync or maybe simple copy or TAR to an external USB.


good luck

yes. of course. that's what we have always done in a situation like that. the only time we would reboot the system is if we were to preform an update. But I really wasnt paying much attention to what I was typing. but thank you! I will try that and see how everything goes.