2009/6/21 Rafał Radecki radecki.rafal@gmail.com
Hi all. I'm currently having a following problem: I have only ssh connection to a CentOS 5.2 system, there are two harddiscs on it. One stores the system (/ filesystem) and the other should be used to help restore the system in case of first disks' failure. I thought that maybe dump would be a good utility to make it. But in only works on read-only filesystems. In one article I've read that making a snapshot of the / filesystem (then it wouldbe read-only) and backing it could help. But aren't snapshots limited to logical volumes (LVM)? My friend told me to use rsync to back up the entire / filesystem to the second disk and then in case o failure the system from the copy should boot ok.
Could anyone provide any suggestions? I don't have physical contact with the machine so for example RAID 1 isn't a possible option/
Any help will be very kindly appreciated.
With regards, R.
rsync will probably be your best bet. You'll be able to make an exact copy of the / root system, regardless of what filesystem it uses.
Furthermore, you can choose to exclude certain stuff from being copied over to the backup HDD, and all the files will be accesabile like they are on the first HDD. The advantage of this, is that the HDD could be put into another machine, without having to figure out how to restore it. And, you could run a cronob to sync the files every night.