Hi all, A friend has an aging linux server on which he runs a web app that he custom built. The web app's written in Perl and has grown organically with libraries and other dependencies added over the years. The server's getting a bit long in the tooth and my concern is a proper backup is needed. My first instinct is that given he doesn't have an exact handle on dependencies etc. he needs to ensure that he has a backed up copy of the entire system "as is"... and that for backup purposes as well as having something to properly dev on, a virtual machine is the way to go. With a virtual machine, one then has some breathing space to do proper dependency analysis etc. in preparation for a clean OS install and should current hardware die, provided that file and db changes have been backed up in interim, wouldn't be too hard to switch over to VM. The server uses Linux software RAID1 # mdadm --detail /dev/md1 /dev/md1: Version : 00.90.03 Creation Time : Sun Mar 26 17:57:19 2006 Raid Level : raid1 Array Size : 76196224 (72.67 GiB 78.02 GB) Used Dev Size : 76196224 (72.67 GiB 78.02 GB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 2 Preferred Minor : 1 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Mon Jan 28 17:35:20 2013 State : active Active Devices : 2 Working Devices : 2 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 How would you image the system, to P2V it? In theory I think one could: * Image a single drive to a virtual disk.. boot into degraded state, recover or drop raid. * Image both drives to virtual disks.. boot into normal state * Build a VM using same underlying OS then using a live environment on both systems, rsync files from source over destination, overwriting destination entirely.. Fix fstab/raid config.. Not entirely sure on which tools to use tho to do this, pitfalls and such.. Also friend wants to minimise downtime as the webapp powers a relative's web store.