-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Todd Cary Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 8:00 PM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: [CentOS] The equivalent of Ghosting the system
If I were to lose my main hard drive, I would like to have the opportunity to do the same as I can do using Windows: restore from my USB and have a working system.
If I were to rsync everything on the main drive (excluding the backup drive, of course and a few other directories) to my USB drive, could I restore using some CD based version of Linux e.g. Knoppix?
Good old tar works well here. If you have a big enough USB drive, but you can tar up different parts of the tree onto different memory sticks.
Just boot into a recovery CD. Re-setup your partitions, mirrors etc. Format them. Un-tar into them. Run grub/lilo whatever to install the bootloader. Reboot, and voila!
To reduce time and size of backup/restore you can use rpm with the audit flag to find all files that have changed from the original rpm, tar only those. Save a list of RPMs installed, make a kickstart floppy of the list. Tar up user files. Re-install OS, using kickstart floppy. Un-tar the config files, un-tar the user files and away you go.
-Ross
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