[CentOS] Filesystem backup?

Sun Jun 21 12:14:03 UTC 2009
Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com>

At Sun, 21 Jun 2009 11:49:09 +0200 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> 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

Dump works just fine on a read-write file system.  There is the pretty
much standard limitation (that applies to *all* backup methods) that
when backing up an 'active' file system: there will always be files that
will miss the backup because they were being written during the backup
process. 

> 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.

Make an initial dump to get the base system copied, then set up a cron
job to sync the disks once a day (or more frequently) with rsync.

> 
> With regards,
> R.
> 
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>                                                                                          

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