On Tue, 28 Aug 2012, Daniel Jitnah <djitnah@greenwareit.com.au> wrote:
Perhaps "fsarchiver" may do the job? It does backup live systems.
http://www.fsarchiver.org/Main_Page According to the above web page it merely does file level access to the data. So if you have a live database or something similar then you WILL get corrupt data. On Tue, 28 Aug 2012, Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net> wrote:
There are also dump utilities for various file systems, for example xfsdump/xfsrestore for XFS, and probably similar tools for EXT2/3/4.
I believe that they all have the same issues.
If you're using lvm, you could take an lvm snapshot and then create a backup of that. I'll leave it to the lvm experts to comment in detail.
To make a backup of a live system you need to snapshot ALL inter-related filesystems at the same time. If for example you have a database store and it's log files on separate filesystems then it may be theoretically impossible to create snapshots in a way that guarantees no data loss on restore (based on previous discussion on this list about database logging). If there are no cross-filesystem data dependencies then LVM snapshots will work well. As will BTRFS and ZFS snapshots. But for RHEL there is no reasonable option of ZFS for BTRFS Red Hat say: https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/docs/en- US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Storage_Administration_Guide/ch-btrfs.html # Btrfs is not a production quality file system at this point. With Red Hat # Enterprise Linux 6 it is at a tech preview stage So for a RHEL user who wants live snapshots of databases it seems that any good option would involve using LVM and keeping all correlated data on one filesystem. http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/08/08/hard-drives-backup/ For someone who's not using a Red Hat supported environment ZFS seems to be a necessary part of an ideal solution at this time, see my above blog post for details. For backing up the boot partition etc (the other part of the original request) I'm not sure what is the best option on Linux and so far none of the answers have addressed this. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/