Recommend: Cold build the sandbox system, install whatever software is strictly necessary, create test user accounts. Then copy selected data as required taking serious precautions against live output leaking out through printers, email or whatever. It is normal to change all personal data on test system to test values during the copy process.
Personal data includes Names, Addresses and email addresses.
Then if you have a bad test run all that happens is your test site gets more correspondence than usual.
Given identical hardware you can sometimes work with cloned systems provided that they are on a ring-fenced network in a secure building and all printed output is shredded. By definition this environment would not allow you to copy data across a network.
Hello All,
I am trying to clone an entire AIX virtual machine to a new virtual machine including all partitions and OS.Can anyone help me on the procedure to follow? I am not really sure on how it can be done.Thanks in advance.
Please use CODE tags for sample input, sample output, and for code... (4 Replies)
Hello i am new on Solaris, and i need to migrate my old AIX 5.3 to Solaris 11.2
Now i have all apps working fine but i have the backup cause i was reading and i have not idea about what method must i choose.
Btw on AIX i had a mksysb backup to restore all system and obviously another backups to... (4 Replies)
I have backed up the contents of my Solaris 10 machine in its entirety, and I'm trying to figure out if I can somehow use this archive to restore my old system just as it was on a new machine. Assuming I have all files from my old machine backed up, is this possible?
What I've been trying to do... (6 Replies)
Hi All,
I have successfully backup & restore (using tar) one of my Debian Lenny Servers.
On the restore server (standby machine), everytime i have to erase the disk & extract the tar backup.
I want to extract the tar on the running restore server on a directory for e.g /systembackup-01,... (11 Replies)
Hello,
I'm still new in HP-UX backup and I want to do a FULL BACKUP of HP-UX server to TAPE device. After reading on several forums and posts, i have list down several steps on how to do a full backup on HP-UX with fbackup. I would like the gurus here to comment/advise on the steps below
1)... (4 Replies)
I would like to know if I can do a full system back
up on my Unix Sco openserver 5.0.5 Machine. If so, What
is the syntax to do this or where can I find this
information at?
Also, is it possible to make this tape bootable so
that I can easily do a full system restore? Any
information on... (2 Replies)
I have unix server with OS 5.8 ,,,
I tried ufsdump 0ua -f /dev/rmt/0 / to perform full system backup on tape but I failed could any one give a procedure for full system backup on solaris machine using tapes??? (1 Reply)
hi,
Recently, I had receive one system. it's run on the unix tru64 server.
I looking some log files when i know don't work few months age system backup to tape.
Below error:
INFO:Tape backups to tape tape0 starting
for backup list:
slot2:/disk4
Backup Command Variable... (0 Replies)
Please help. I am new to linux. I wrote a script to run the backup on lunix machine but the job gave me an error. I am using Linux 2.6.14.3. Below is the sample of my script can anyone tell me where went wrong? Thanks in advance.
#!/bin/sh
dat=$(date +%d%b%y)... (5 Replies)
FSVS - Backup HOWTO(5) fsvs FSVS - Backup HOWTO(5)NAME
HOWTO: Backup -
This document is a step-by-step explanation how to do backups using FSVS. This document is a step-by-step explanation how to do backups
using FSVS.
Preparation
If you're going to back up your system, you have to decide what you want to have stored in your backup, and what should be left out.
Depending on your system usage and environment you first have to decide:
o Do you only want to backup your data in /home?
o Less storage requirements
o In case of hardware crash the OS must be set up again
o Do you want to keep track of your configuration in /etc?
o Very small storage overhead
o Not much use for backup/restore, but shows what has been changed
o Or do you want to backup your whole installation, from / on?
o Whole system versioned, restore is only a few commands
o Much more storage space needed - typically you'd need at least a few GB free space.
The next few moments should be spent thinking about the storage space for the repository - will it be on the system harddisk, a secondary
or an external harddisk, or even off-site?
Note:
If you just created a fresh repository, you probably should create the 'default' directory structure for subversion - trunk, branches,
tags; this layout might be useful for your backups.
The URL you'd use in fsvs would go to trunk.
Possibly you'll have to take the available bandwidth into your considerations; a single home directory may be backed up on a 56k modem, but
a complete system installation would likely need at least some kind of DSL or LAN.
Note:
If this is a production box with sparse, small changes, you could take the initial backup on a local harddisk, transfer the directory
with some media to the target machine, and switch the URLs.
A fair bit of time should go to a small investigation which file patterns and paths you not want to back-up.
o Backup files like *.bak, *~, *.tmp, and similar
o History files: .sh-history and similar in the home-directories
o Cache directories: your favourite browser might store many MB of cached data in you home-directories
o Virtual system directories, like /proc and /sys, /dev/shmfs.
Telling FSVS what to do
Given $WC as the working directory - the base of the data you'd like backed up (/, /home), and $URL as a valid subversion URL to your
(already created) repository path.
Independent of all these details the first steps look like these:
cd $WC
fsvs urls $URL
Now you have to say what should be ignored - that'll differ depending on your needs/wishes.
fsvs ignore './**~' './**.tmp' './**.bak'
fsvs ignore ./proc/ ./sys/ ./tmp/
fsvs ignore ./var/tmp/ ./var/spool/lpd/
fsvs ignore './var/log/*.gz'
fsvs ignore ./var/run/ /dev/pts/
fsvs ignore './etc/*.dpkg-dist' './etc/*.dpkg-new'
fsvs ignore './etc/*.dpkg-old' './etc/*.dpkg-bak'
Note:
/var/run is for transient files; I've heard reports that reverting files there can cause problems with running programs.
Similar for /dev/pts - if that's a devpts filesystem, you'll run into problems on update or revert - as FSVS won't be allowed to
create entries in this directory.
Now you may find that you'd like to have some files encrypted in your backup - like /etc/shadow, or your .ssh/id_* files. So you tell fsvs
to en/decrypt these files:
fsvs propset fsvs:commit-pipe 'gpg -er {your backup key}' /etc/shadow /etc/gshadow
fsvs propset fsvs:update-pipe 'gpg -d' /etc/shadow /etc/gshadow
Note:
This are just examples. You'll probably have to exclude some other paths and patterns from your backup, and mark some others as to-be-
filtered.
The first backup
fsvs commit -m 'First commit.'
That's all there is to it!
Further use and maintenance
The further usage is more or less the commit command from the last section.
When do you have to do some manual work?
o When ignore patterns change.
o New filesystems that should be ignored, or would be ignored but shouldn't
o You find that your favorite word-processor leaves many *.segv files behind, and similar things
o If you get an error message from fsvs, check the arguments and retry. In desperate cases (or just because it's quicker than debugging
yourself) ask on dev [at] fsvs.tigris.org.
Restoration in a working system
Depending on the circumstances you can take different ways to restore data from your repository.
o
'fsvs export' allows you to just dump some repository data into your filesystem - eg. into a temporary directory to sort things out.
o Using 'fsvs revert' you can get older revisions of a given file, directory or directory tree inplace.
o Or you can do a fresh checkout - set an URL in an (empty) directory, and update to the needed revision.
o If everything else fails (no backup media with fsvs on it), you can use subversion commands (eg. export) to restore needed parts, and
update the rest with fsvs.
Recovery for a non-booting system
In case of a real emergency, when your harddisks crashed or your filesystem was eaten and you have to re-partition or re-format, you should
get your system working again by
o booting from a knoppix or some other Live-CD (with FSVS on it),
o partition/format as needed,
o mount your harddisk partitions below eg. /mnt,
o and then recovering by
$ cd /mnt
$ export FSVS_CONF=/etc/fsvs # if non-standard
$ export FSVS_WAA=/var/spool/fsvs # if non-standard
$ fsvs checkout -o softroot=/mnt
If somebody asks really nice I'd possibly even create a recovery command that deduces the softroot parameter from the current working
directory.
For more information please take a look at Using an alternate root directory.
Feedback
If you've got any questions, ideas, wishes or other feedback, please tell us in the mailing list users [at] fsvs.tigris.org.
Thank you!
Author
Generated automatically by Doxygen for fsvs from the source code.
Version trunk:2424 11 Mar 2010 FSVS - Backup HOWTO(5)