Did you get the output of cat /proc/filesystems ?
Writing a longer reply, but wanted to catch you whiel you were still online
---------- Post updated at 03:18 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:34 PM ----------
Those help a
lot. You've got a single-disk IBM-PC compatible system. There's no worrying about which disk to back up, and the backup you purchased is definitely larger than the disk the server uses. And all the files you care about, your company's data-files, are probably all in /home/, stored in /dev/sda6, nicely separated from the rest.
You've got two options:
A) Offline backup. Turn your server off, boot some backup software, run the backup, reboot, done. It won't be able to serve files while it's backing up.
500 gigs might take 15 hours on a 100baseT network, or even twice that if half-duplex, so I'm not sure a network backup is practical. Too bad, since a
udpcast boot CD would make it much easier for you.
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:
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.)
- 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.