Server System Drive Backup for F14/A6 Upgrade

[techlife]

As the title implies, I would like to backup the system drive of my HDA prior to attempting the F14/Amahi 6 upgrade. This is key because the server in our home IS mission critical. I can go down for a few hours to install/configure/tinker with the upgrade. I can't, however, be down for days if things go south. SO I am looking for an easy way to backup my system drive (to USB) so that if necessary, I can do a bare metal restore and be back up and running in no time flat. I'm a recent Windoze convert, not a native. I'm not afraid of the command line as long as I have concise instructions and don't have to guess at how "this method" or "that method" are supposed to work.

I would really like an ongoing solution that does daily (or even weekly) backups of the system drive so that in the event it crashes, I can be back up an running as quickly.

Thanks to all in advance!!

[bigfoot65]

Probably the best solution for you would be Clonezilla. There is a Live CD that you can backup to pretty much any media. I typically backup to my server, different drive of course.

See http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live.php

While we would all like to have a good backup medium in place for Amahi, that is quite a tall order these days. It's difficult to find a solution that is simple and works. So far the best has been Clonezilla, but it is not simple to many.

[scottadamsmith]

I just installed Amahi 6 and Fedora 14 yesterday and it was literally my first experience with Linux at all. I was almost positive I would screw up some settings at some point early on messing around with the server, so I wanted a complete backup of my server install and used Clonezilla as recommended above. I have the server related partiitions on one drive and my file shares on another, so I just backed up the entire server drive to an 8GB usb flash drive. Sure enough, today I was trying to get a print server setup and I screwed up the DHCP somehow so none of my other machines could connect to the internet. I thought, I could try and figure out what I did, or I could use this an excuse to find out if this backup I made even works. Booted up off Clonezilla, restored the USB to hard disk, rebooted and everything was flawless.

Just follow the step by step directions provided here http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live-doc.php. I used them for creating the backup, but honestly after doing that, I was able to do the recovery without it because it is not all that far off from making the backup.

Good luck!

[techlife]

Thanks guys...I'll give it a shot!!

[Bailifei]

maybe a system backup wizard is the easiest way to backup system.
u just follow the wizard and the system will be backup to an image. when u need the system, just restore it.
u can even restore the system to different hardware environment.
i recommend easus todo backup, acronis backup, and paragon backup.
arconis is a a little bit expensive for ordinary business users.
easus todo is good both in features and price.
paragon is just ok.

[bigfoot65]

There is also a Clonezilla backup guide in the wiki.

http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Clonezilla

As for the GUI backup software, most do not work for backing up Linux boxes. If you want to back up Windows though, it works great.