Red Hat

Hello,

I'm trying to take a live backup of a red hat 5.5 64 bit server (with LVM).
Afterwards I want to restore this backup on an empty server, so basicly I want to dublicate the server.
But when I boot the server after the restore, I get stuck at "GRUB _" and changing the menu.lst-file doesn't appear to work

I found the method I used, described here: "http://www.backupcentral.com/wiki/index.php/Linux_%26_Windows_Bare_Metal_Recovery"
But as they mention somewhere on the website, it is apparently only for servers without LVM, which is probably the reason why it doesn't work... or isn't it?

Can anyone help me with this? And otherwise propose me another solution?

Thank you,

Matthias

One option you can use is to use dd to duplicate your entire drive to another drive or image file, then use dd again to push that image to the drive on your new server. This will take a long time, and you will have to remove the specific entries in your duplicate server, such as IP addresses and hostname.

See if this helps:

Back Up (And Restore) LVM Partitions With LVM Snapshots | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials

Thank you for your reply.

But is it possible to copy entire directories with dd?
Because when I try to use it (dd if=/boot of=/filename), I get the message "/boot is a directory" (which is off course meant to be)

Matthias

---------- Post updated at 02:42 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:41 PM ----------

The reply above was for mark54g.

Thanks for your reply as well dude2cool: I'll take a look at it.

Matthias

From man dd, dd works on files not directories. You should use cpio to backup a dir or tar or other such utils..

.

I had meant if you want an entire clone, to do the following (as an example):

Code:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/home/user/somefile.img

this assumes that /home is NOT on /dev/sda or any partitions contained within /dev/sda. This also assumes that there is sufficient space on /home/user to contain the entire capacity of the drive.

Alternately, if you just want the files, then use tar, even through netcat.

Well I'm supposed to back up the OS, not seperate files. (other people are in charge of data back-up )

mark54g: I used dd to backup /dev/sda and instead of writing to the home directory I wrote it to an external disk (/media/sdc).
The only bummer was that the backup took the size of my harddisk (67G) and that it took some time as well, but if I schedule the back up in the weekend it shouldn't be any problem.

Anyway, I didn't think the solution could be that simple, but yet it did work.
So thanks a lot!

Regards,

Matthias