[CentOS] Hardisk cloning for centos-5.3
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
Mon Feb 15 17:54:28 UTC 2010
Paul Heinlein wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Feb 2010, James Bensley wrote:
>
>> Clonezilla do a network version that does this,
>>
>> http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-server-edition/
>
> +1 for Clonezilla. For smaller-scale cloning, it and an external USB
> drive are just the ticket (assuming your hardware can boot from a USB
> device).
Clonezilla is very versatile. If you have some network-shared space that can
hold an intermediate (compressed) copy of the image (via nfs, smb, or ssh) the
easy approach is to boot from the clonezilla-live CD, connect to the storage
location, and save the copy from your source machine, then repeat and restore it
on the target(s). This is also a handy way to keep snapshot backups of dual-boot
laptops etc. when making changes.
You can also do disk->disk copies from the clonezilla-live boot if you can
install them in the same box or connect with a USB adapter cable. Dd can be
used but it will copy the whole disk. Clonezilla knows enough about most
filesystems to only copy the used parts. (It's basically a linux boot with
scripted, menu driven partimag, ntfsclone, etc. tools). A USB boot works as
well or better than the CD, and if you do a lot of cloning you can add drbl to a
server (it's packaged for centos and easy to install) to provide PXE network
booting into clonezilla which comes up with the server already NFS mounted for
access to the images.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
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