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Full Discussion: Help finding a Unix friendly RAID 1 backup
Special Forums Hardware Filesystems, Disks and Memory Help finding a Unix friendly RAID 1 backup Post 302509069 by c.wakeman on Tuesday 29th of March 2011 05:48:32 PM
Old 03-29-2011
Okay, so I have a few fairly specific questions you may be able to help me with:

Based upon the tutorial you provided for the two options:

Quote:
Instead I'd suggest booting a gentoo minimal liveCD. The amd64 disk is probably better if your system can boot 64-bit at all (whether your server's OS is 64-bit isn't relevant for an offline backup, just your CPU). You can make your server reboot cleanly by running /sbin/reboot , it may take several minutes as it will try to shut down things in an orderly fashion. When it reboots, make it boot the Gentoo CD, it should boot you to a raw Linux root prompt. From there you can do this:
  1. fdisk -l to see what your main hard drive is. It'll almost certainly be /dev/sda but it's good to be sure! (Ignore sda1, sda2, etc -- those are partitions. We want the whole disk.)
  2. chmod 400 /dev/sda* Prevent yourself from writing to your company drive and any partitions on it. Just insurance. The setting doesn't exist outside of the livecd's tiny mind, so it'll forget this next reboot.
  3. Plug in your Buffalo disk with USB, wait 15 seconds, then fdisk -l again. It will probably show up as /dev/sdb. Press enter to get a prompt back if kernel debug messages print garbage over it.
  4. dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=16777216 && /sbin/poweroff or, "copy the raw contents of /dev/sda into /dev/sdb, then turn off the server". It will be stonily silent while doing this, but your hard drive activity light will suddenly be mostly solid-on. (The bs=16777216 is just for efficiency -- copy 16 megs at a time instead of 512 bytes at a time.)
  5. Once it finishes, it will turn off(literally, power itself completely off) to let you know the backup is complete and it's now safe to remove the USB drive, CD, and let the server boot back up normally. If an error happens, it won't turn off, just go back to a prompt and wait.

This will take roughly four to eight hours, I think. In the end you'll have a raw, bare-metal backup; Windows won't be able to use it, but Linux can, and if your server's hard drive dies, you could crack the drive out of your Buffalo's case and expect it to boot normally inside your server. (Assuming, of course, it has the proper connectors.)

There might even be ways to keep the /home partition on it fresh once you make it since your Linux server will still be able to talk to this disk.

B) Online backup. It won't back up the whole server, just your company's datafiles. You may be able to do this with minimal interruption to the server's clients, but, files in use may not be backed up properly.
  • Plug the USB drive into the server, wait 15 seconds, fdisk -l . See if it lists the partitions on your USB disk. There may be several but the largest one should be the data one.
  • Try to mount the disk. mkdir /mnt/backup then mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/backup . May not be sdb1 of course!
  • tar -vcpf /mnt/backup/filename-date.tar /home/ Will create one giant tarball under filename-date.tar. Filenames will pour across the screen as it adds them.
  • Once it's done, umount /mnt/backup then sync . Once the sync command finishes you know it will be safe to power down and unplug your USB drive.
For Option A:
For the gentoo minimal liveCD, I went to their website and I think found the correct file on one of their mirrors. Using RIT's mirror as an example found here: Index of /gentoo/releases/alpha/current-iso/
do I want to use this file: install-alpha-minimal-20110319.iso ?

(Neither the OS nor the CPU are 64 bit, I checked, or at least I think I did.)

When I do power down the server and use the LiveCD, you said to "make it boot the Gentoo CD"; how do I make it do that?

For Option B:
If I make the tar file and in the future want to back it up again on a weekly basis; how would I change this code to make it apply?

Code:
tar cvf /dev/st0 'find / -mtime -1 -type f -print'

From what I understand, the -mtime -1 portion of the code determines the duration to search for new files; in my case would I make it -mtime -7 ?

Is this correct?

My plan, assuming I can get the appropriate minimal liveCD file, is to do the 'bare metal' backup tomorrow and do weekly backups from there. If I don't think I can get that to work (i.e. I don't feel comfortable with it) I'll go the tarball route for now.

If I go the tarball route for now on the external drive and then next week decide to try the bare metal on the same drive, what happens to the tarball? What if the situation is reversed?

Thanks again.
 

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