Hi All,

I have Squid setup on a Ubuntu 7.04 server.
Can anyone suggest a good backup utility?

Thanks in advance
jonette20

What exactly are you looking to back up, and what kind of media are you willing to use? Are you trying to back up the squid cache?

I personally like dump and restore, but you could certainly use other things like tar/gzip.

I don't think I need to backup the squid cache.
I just want to be able to restore the service if the server goes down with minimum amount of time.

Any suggestions?

It never hurts to backup the configuration file backing up the store is a waste of time.

Also if you are worried about squid crashing, a very simple solution is to setup Webmin to monitor the process and do command X if the process is killed unexpectedly...

Webmin will also backup configuration files.


-weisso

Maybe you need Disaster Recovery solution, if so check out Mondo Rescue.

Hi,

I think I need something like Ghost for Linux. I just want to be able to duplicate the system in case of hardware crash or Squid services crashing.

I don't want to have to reinstall Ubuntu or Squid, and if u know my history, u would know why. (smile)

Has anyone tried Ghost for Linux? Does it have alot of issues?
Of course, I will keep looking at other forums and such to find out more, just thought I would ask.

jonette20

Hello,

If you read up on some of the options presented above you will see that you can clone and restore a linux machine using a ghost like process, but free of cost. To summarize here are two quick ways of doing it, just so you get an idea of what is involved. You need to understand for this to work, that machine you are restoring this image too has to be of somewhat identical hardware or else this will not work AND this also assumes that you are using a less customized kernel. THESE are just examples to show you that it is possible and they must be tailored to your situation.

These examples also assume you will have identical partition tables.


1. Using rsync:
shell#rsync -Saq --numeric-ids --exclude=/proc --exclude=/sys \
-e 'ssh -c blowfish' SourceServer:/ path_to_SourceServer_img/
That will copy all data on source into one file

shell# dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/MBR_backup.bin bs=512 count=1
That backs up MBR
2. Using Netcat:

shell_source# dd if=/dev/hda conv=sync,noerror bs=64k | nc -l -q 0 -p 5000
shell_target# nc 192.168.1.1 5000 | dd of=/dev/hda bs=64k
This will take a long time.
Boot from Live Cd on Target.
Chroot into new env.
edit configuration files to fit new machine.
Restore MBR or Remake.
Reboot.


Hope this gives you the information you were looking for.


-weisso