How to backup SERVER/AMAHI itself? (policy?)

[lou1z]

mondoarchive will do it. it's only cli but there is plenty of documentation for cron jobs/incremental backup etc.
i can tell you that it works flawlessly from bare metal. just needs a little setting up. probably more aimed towards the techie to be fair.

http://www.mondorescue.org/

[bigfoot65]

Clonezilla does an awesome job. It can be run from a live cd. We have packaged a netboot version which is now in testing. It will allow a hard wired machine to backup/restore directly from the HDA.

More to come once testing is complete.

Bigfoot65

[swhite58]

I'm new to Amahi, having used Clark Connect (now ClearOS) in the past. I just have a home network for myself, wife and two sons.

In the CC box, I had an external USB HD for backup, but this time I'm using an internal separate physical disk. I just used rsync, via a shell script that uses commands like:

Code: Select all

/usr/bin/rsync -avH /path/shane/ /backup_path/shane

This adds new files and updates changed ones. Once a week I run a different script with commands like:

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/usr/bin/rsync -avH --delete /path/shane/ /backup_path/shane

This also removes deleted files from the backup.

I know there are cleverer ways of doing this, but I just put this together in a hour from the man page. It looks as if rsnapshot might be an improvement.

Shane

[wvdlee]

I recently configured Rsnapshot for backing up my server to an usb drive.
I made a howto in the wiki:
http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Rsnapshot

[rostern]

How about using "Back in Time" to back up HDA data? I have downloaded and installed it from the list of repositories. It is very simple to use which is good for a linux neophyte like me. So far, it seems to work well to perform a daily scheduled back up of the server data to an attached USB drive.

[bigfoot65]

We have another app in testing called Crashplan (http://www.amahi.org/apps/crashplan)that will allow you to backup all your clients and server. It is in beta but anticipate release in the near future.

[OldSkul]

When can we expect Clonezilla or crashplan to be available to all users?

I would like to clone/backup my HDD.

[HHCosmin]

hi guys! congrats on the amahi project. has a lot of potential.
i was just searching for some knowledge on how could i backup the server itself. i believe that backing up the server with all of it's stuff is a must. it should be very easy for a user do backups/restores of its server in case the system drive gets broken. upon reading i've also realized that moving the server to another physical server is also something someone would want to do. motherborads/cpus get broken so getting to a new host pc should be easy to do. also being able to backup the actual data should be soemting easy to do but not as important as the other two cases. the key here i think is simplicity. people do not want to mess with scripts and alike to store their docs, porn, mp3s etc.

as i see it there are 3 cases:
- backup the whole installation (without data). maybe this could be done with some imaging software. should be automatic and done in the gui
- port the server to another physical server. i guess simplest would be to save only the config without the data itself. should be something like export/import server settings. all this should be limited to the amahi stuff. i would not mind if the walpaper gets changed. for this all amahi stuff should be localized like in a db. i find it so convenient to have something like xmarks to sync my bookmarks. of course in amahi case there would be only one pc to sync and it's not quite the same... but the idea stays. as i see it now in case of server broken/migration i would like to have something like export settings and then go to the new pc... put the disks in and say... import settings.
- backup/export the data... the data that the user stored on the amahi

i'm a windows guy and i must say i admire a few things about linux and more about amahi. i believe amahi would be so much more capable to get more than 1% of the home server market (as i know linux has 1% of the desktops) if it would focus on being simple usage. otherwise it would be so great but only a few geeks, with time to burn (on experimenting scripts and stuff) will be using it. i'm eager to use amahi but the fact that i do not know linux, backup the server is not simple, disk management is not simple, server migration is not simple, heck i could not make vnc run and had to keep swapping the vid cables.

i think you are doing a great job and are getting there. keep it up!

[bigfoot65]

Hello,

Agreed. As previously mentioned, Clonezilla does a good job of bare metal backups. You can backup/restore disks or partitions. This is what I use for my HDA. I have restored it several times with no issues.

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