Red Hat

Hi!
I am administering a system I didn't configure. I know it is a RHEL 6.3 VM image and there are others as well. How do I make a backup of the image and of the filesytems, in case I screw up the configuration.

How can I restore it as well.

My plan is this
1) Find out what kind of VM, and use the vm tools
2) Take a tar of important directories
3) Schedule filesystem backup

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks md888

This is a sound plan, but how can we help in this? I suggest you go to the administrator of the system the VM runs on and you find out how the system file space is provided. It might be a LUN from a storage system (depending on the storage system you can take a backup there, even when running), a file on the host systems filesystem (power down the VM and simply copy the file), a bootable NPIV-provided share (use SAN systems methods, as above) and probably some other things i haven't mentioned here.

"Its a RHEL 6.3 i didn't set up" is a rather meagre description of your environment and whatever we can suggest will be as substantial as your description - that is: not at all.

Simple. Backup "/path/to/somedir":

Code:

(cd /path/to ; tar cf - ./somedir | gzip -9 > /backupdir/somedir.$(date +'%Y%m%d').tar.gz)

Restore same:

Code:

(rm -rf /path/to/somedir ; cd /path/to ; gzip -cd /backupdir/somedir.<somedate>.tar.gz | tar xf -)

Use "cron" to schedule a (perhaps recurring) backup, but the real question is: which tool(s) do you want to use for this purpose. Depending on the answer you will have to do some or many preparations, or none at all.

Again: meagre description of environment leads to meagre/very generic answers.

From the "50 tips for better english": be more or less specific. ;-))

I hope this helps.

bakunin