Hi,

We using a very old version of redhat (8) for one mayor business application.
At the last hardware change we start with virtualisation.

The old redhat version would not be converted to virtual, so we start a upgrade to a newer version of linux and the application.

The implementation of this will take a will.

Until the new system is up and running we will keep using the old application on the old linux version on old hardware. This will not be a problem, because the hardware change of the other servers we have 6 spare servers.

We daily backup our systems to disc/tape and the new serverpark came wiht new software and a new tapeunit.

The old linux server cann't backuped with this new stuff so the ols backserver and tape unit is still in use.

To day we are testing the backup of the new Linux server and get messages from a NFS share between the old and the new Linux server. This share we can use to migrate to the new server.

Mine thought, after this was to use a share of the root (/) directory of the old linux server and mount this on the new one. So I can use this mount to backup the old linux server with the new backup sollution.
Our linux administrator was uncapable to create this share.

So I want to ask the possibility here.
Can I make a share of the root(/) directory of redhat linux 8.
Can I mount this share in Centos
Can I take a backup of this mounting point.
and last, but not less unimportant, can i restore to a construction like this?

I hope someone tell if this is possible how to create it.

regards Peter

I think sharing /proc and /sys is a bad idea. Sharing system directories rw would be a bad idea for security reasons. Look at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. You can mount the static partitions read-only. Since they don't change, you only need to back them up once. The /proc, /sys, /dev, /tmp, /var/tmp/ directories don't need to be backed up. /proc & /sys are psuedo directories, containing psuedo files that don't exist until being read. They are created on the fly. One item in /proc will read the entire memory space. The device nodes in /dev are created when the system boots.

It may be better to mount the destination of the backup and back up the files from the RH 8 machine to the share.

If it is OK to power down the RH 8 host, backing up from a live disk, so the filesystem is off line will allow a more accurate backup. You could create image dumps this way, which could allow a quicker restore in case of drive failure. But I'd still recommend file backups for this application's data files.