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#1 2007-08-04 16:35:31
- dystoptic
- Member
- Registered: 2007-02-09
- Posts: 20
Backup of running system
Hello,
at the moment I do backups of my home and storage (audio,video,...) partitions to an external hard disk.
For this I use a little script which uses rsync.
It is possible to use the same script to do a complete backup of my root partition? I have concerns, that if the system is running there could arise problems with inconsistent file states.
Exists there a tool that does something like the shadow copies on windows? Or is it safe to simply run the backup?
I know I could use a boot cd, but I know I'm lazy and wouldn't do this long.
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#2 2007-08-05 02:13:40
- ataraxia
- Member
- From: Pittsburgh
- Registered: 2007-05-06
- Posts: 1,553
Re: Backup of running system
As long as you pick a quiet enough time to backup, you'll be fine. Do be aware that you won't have a bootable restore this way without reloading GRUB after the restore.
I use "dump" over the network to back up my root filesystem and take care of this annoyance. It works on ext2 and ext3. XFS also has xfs_dump for this purpose. With other filesystems you don't have this nice option.
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#3 2007-08-05 09:18:10
- dystoptic
- Member
- Registered: 2007-02-09
- Posts: 20
Re: Backup of running system
What did you mean with
reloading grub after the restore
That I have to reinstall grub on my external drive after every backup process?
Last edited by dystoptic (2007-08-05 09:18:50)
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#4 2007-08-05 16:45:48
- ataraxia
- Member
- From: Pittsburgh
- Registered: 2007-05-06
- Posts: 1,553
Re: Backup of running system
No, that if you ever lose your disk and have to restore from the backup, you'll have to remember to reinstall GRUB onto the new disk.
(Actually, though, I still have to do that with 'dump' as well... My above post has me scratching my head now and might be the dumbest post I've made on this forum yet...)
I did think of another problem with using rsync though - /dev won't be backed up properly. Depending on how you run rsync, you'll either back up the one created by udev or not get much of anything. Neither one is what you really want (although if you get the udev-created one, at least the backup will work).
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