[CentOS] Hardisk cloning for centos-5.3

Mon Feb 15 17:54:28 UTC 2010
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

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