Automated backups, full disk image
 

I have a server running ubuntu 10.04. It would be an awful thing if i ever lost the disk. I do file backups across the network. What i would like to do is create an image of the disk (probably weekly), i could put another drive in which will be the image of the current system disk.
From doing research i know a lot of people will boot to a live cd and then use dd.
Can anyone help me out in automating the process? Manually doing this every Sunday isn't something i would like to have to do.
thanks

Joe

So why aren't you using a hardware RAID?

I take what i was given. This is for work. Although i may look into something like that, but i think the company has a plan to upgrade our VM server, so when that happens i can just have them take snapshots.
For now i think this option would be best.

Fair point, we've all been there.
If it's in any way mission critical then they should be using RAID.

Think about what you're backing up, do you really NEED a disk image?

Would taking a full file-system backup to tarball on a remote machine or a physical tape along with a properly documented restore procedure mitigate the risk enough? I've implemented a similar strategy several times along with six-monthly DR testing and it's worked out fine.

I'm looking for the easiest solution, if it is possible to make automated disk images to a drive thats already in the machine, that would work out best, because if the drive dies, you reboot from the other drive. Very little downtime.
if i were to copy all the files to the other drive, if the first drive dies, i would have to install the bootloader on the other drive correct? Or is there a way that i can prep the drive, so its ready to go, so all i would have to do is boot from the second drive because all of the files were recent?
I've never had to do any recovery regarding the boot loader, so i would need some help as to what i can do in that respect.
thanks

Joe

1.st:
make a clone/image to the second drive, so that if you test run boot from it, it starts

2.nd:
make rsync or whatever backup from 1.st drive online to 2.nd drive, so the changes are archived as many times /day you want or need to do it.


Anyway, a RAID1 is what you want and is rather cheap for a company playing with loosing data (around $100 max. for a HW RAID card)

good luck

That is what i'm going to do.
Thanks for the help.