I want to backup my server.
This is a brand new server and I tried clonezilla but it failed

I am trying to get a full backup where - I pop in a disk and reboot the server and the o/s on the disk comes into play and I am able to backup the hard disk

This is a Raid 5 configuration and could you please guide me to some enterprise level backup software either paid or free

Is this popularly called Bare metal backup

I would try and get clonezilla to work. I'd venture a guess and say the RAID is not being identified. What are the details on the RAID? Onboard? Add-in card? What kind?

well..This is a brand new DL380p Gen8 server
No clue as to which version of Raid controller card is on board

Well, unless you tell us what it did, and provide details, we can't help.
Yes, it is. There is also mkcdrec, systemimager, and mondoarchive, all of which do this and are free. I'd go for mondoarchive personally, if you want to stick with free software. Commercial software tends to be a bit pricey for such things.

Say I have a HDD of 300 GB (sda) which I partition as follows
a) / 50 GB (/dev/sda1)
b) Swap 50 GB
c) boot 500 MB
d) remaining (/dev/sda2)

Now I take backup of each /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2

The /dev/sda1 is 10 percent used and /dev/sda2 is 4 percent used

Now if I use PING or clonezilla to backup only the partitions sda1 and sda2
and If I replace the HDD of 300 GB with 290 GB
will clonezilla / PING be able to restore the partitions considering that
the space on the new sda1 and sda2 is a little less than original ....
But considering that usage is 10 percent and 4 percent ...does it matter ?

This is what I found

Clonezilla is available in two models
32 bit and 64 bit amd (amd 64 bit is also suitable for intel 64 bit)

However both the above do not work for me.

My drive is configured with physical disk/ logical volume manager lvm2


So To solve the issue I am trying the following
I downloaded a number of Linux Live CD's
none of them worked with the commands

pvscan, vgscan, vgdisplay, lvdisplay

only one of them Knoppix works with the above commands

so I am using Knoppix Live cd 6.7.1 2011-09-14 English version

I booted the server with the Live cd hence ensuring that the storage array disks (Raid 5)
are not being used....so No open files
Next I ran the following commands


pvscan - this scans for physical volumes
vgscan - this scans for logical volumes

I saw that the logical volumes are inactive
I ran the following command
vgchange -a y (this will make all logical volumes active)
next I mounted the external HDD

dd if=<logical Volume name> | gzip > <path of external hdd>/image.gz

in my case the exact command was

dd if=/dev/vg_proddb12/lv_home | gzip > /home/extdisk/back_20121221_dd/image_home.gz

I hope you guys comment on my solution.

It has been a long struggle to understand stuff.