Ubuntu Servers :: Backup Including System Files - Boot From Live Cd?
Apr 22, 2010
I am researching how to make an effective backup on Ubuntu Server. This server will have Vsftp, VPN, Samba stuff , many other added packages +many printers, many users + data. I know I can use tar for the data /u no problem. 1. I was testing tar on the /home directory on a few user directories. I then created a new directory and did a restore of the users directories on it. I noticed the /home/user owner and group were root. The files in each directory remained the same. This gave me concern. If I had a crash and had to restore these to a new HD. I would have to change these, what else would I need to change? 2. Since I have many config files, how do I back up them? I know I can do a dump, but then users shouldn't be on the system. The system files will change as they add users, printers, etc, and asking users to not work, is not really an option while dump is running. I thought I could do a tar on whole system. (cron late at night .. not as many users) Then in event of crash of HD.
1. Boot from live cd
2. format the new drive
3. tar back in the whole system
Will this work right? Is there something I am missing?
I am somewhat new to Linux and I am looking for a way to back up my HD with all my Linux files. I have a Toshiba laptop running Windows 7. The HD has been partitioned so that the computer can run Red Hat Scientific Linux. Using Grub I can dual boot to either Windows 7 or Linux on start up. I want a simple way of backing up the entire contents of my HD (both partitions - everything) - so that in the event of my laptop being damaged I can reconstruct my set up and data as before with all my files and settings in both Windows 7 and Linux intact. Is there a simple program that will enable me to copy everything to an external HD for back up. Can anyone recommend a package that will do this?
I have Ubuntu 9.10 on my system and i have a lot of apps on it.is there a way that in case of a full re-installation or hard disk replacement i could have all my softwares and settings installed on the new Ubuntu installation.
I'm looking for a semi-automated way to backup my 300+ DVDs. Most are single title movies but some are TV series with multiple episodes. I will need english subtitles also if they are available since a number of my movies are foreign imports. All are region 1. I'd like it all command-line so I can script it. Possibly also get the extra features like commentary, outtakes, etc. but not necessary.What DVD rip/encode software will handle single and multi-title DVDs with subtitles when available and run via command-line? Export to Ogg or Xvid. Speed is second to these features. Distro is unimportant as I have a new 2Tb build specifically for this.
I have a personal ubuntu server that provides apache, glassfish, firewall, routing, email, CVS, MySQL, etc.... This server has been running for a while with two hard drives configured into a RAID 1 array. The array has two partitions, one for swap and one for the data. I currently back up the data with a removable hard drive. I use dd and create an image of one drive and the MBRs (partition tables) of each drive.In a disaster situation I can use this data to recreate one drive and then re mirror it to the second, or just boot the back up.I like this solution because I can easily recover from bare metal, and the backup is transparent. I can browser it if needed since its an uncompressed image of the drive. The one drawback is that I need to reboot the system with a linux CD to do the backup.
My hard drive space is almost at capacity. So what I want to do is add a third drive to the array and migrate it to RAID 5. However this will cause my current backup method to no longer work. How can I back up this RAID 5 array. I need to back up the entire system, and not just the data. I have made many tweaks to the system over the years that it has been running that I can't lose if a restore is needed. I have seen a large thread here that people have been using tar. My concern with tar is how do you use a tar archive to restore a system to a new array. Im assuming that you would need to setup the array and then just restore the archive? Also, i don't have much faith in using tar on a running system. Doesn't this open yourself up to corrupted backups? My second idea is using rsync. While I consider myself experienced in linux from 10 years of personal and professions use, I have not had much experience with this utility. Would rsync provide a more reliable way to backup a running system that would enable a bare metal restore later? I once read something about people using rsync with hard links to create a backup that could store many incremental backups.My main concern with both rsync and tar is not being able to restore the OS to the state that it was in at the time of the backup.
I currently have an Ubuntu 10.04 Server with 10 2TB hard drives (Hot Swappable). I discovered that having a software raid over 16TB is not supported, so I split the drives into 2 sections and have 2 Software Raid arrays storing my movies, audio, pictures, and other software. The total current usage is around 7TB. Since backing the files up to DVDs or even BlueRay is laughable, I am going to backup the system to 2TB hard drives probably 4 of them, the problem becomes that I can only hook one backup drive at a time into the system using a hot swap tray. Now I know that I can do this manually by copying the files one at a time to the drive until it is full, switching the drive out and repeating this, but I am hoping for an automated solution, Start backup, plug first drive in, system fills up drive, swap and repeat. Also it would be nice if the system remembered what had already been backed up so when I add files to the system, I only need to attach the last drive and not start the process over.
I'm going to be launching my website soon, and I found a company to host it on one of their dedicated servers. I think I'm going to go with fedora as to OS, and well my problem is I'm having trouble finding a company to backup up my files, that both supports fedora and well is reasonably priced.
I have tried several places for help but I am getting no where...Here is my background.I have spent all weekend to replicate my development server back at home. I have an Apache remote server with 3 IP based virtual hosts pointing to
[URL]
Now I have been able to set up a VM on my desktop, installed the OS, the applications, the db server, apache etc. Everything is looking good so far. So right now I have,
[URL]
So when I go to 192.168.0.111, I go to [URL] so I guess apache is working aswell.What I want to do is, instead of going to [URL] I want to change it to another address such as a.me.add1How can I do this? I am looking through the virtual hosts section, I have changed server name entry etc but its not working.Can you tell me in big picture what I would need to do to set that up? My current set up doesnt really help me much once the site get the www address.tell me if Document Root of IP address 192.168.0.111 points to [URL] will it always resolve into that webaddress. That is if I enter 192.168.0.111 the browser will redirect it to [URL].
I wrote a script to wake up my windows machine and do an rsync backup of some of my files. I wanted to make this command a accessible through local bin so I made it executable. However the problem is that when I copies files is copies them with root permissions and i can edit or delete them. How can I set the files so they transfer with the proper permissions for my Ubuntu user?
Code: #!/bin/bash # Description: This script first wakes up the client machine and syncs the appropriate folders. # Finally the script shuts down the client if it was off to begin with. if [ "$(whoami)" != "root" ]; then echo "Permission Denied" exit 1 fi .....
I want to create a LiveDVD with lots of packages that do not exist in repos. Stuff that I built from source...
OpenFOAM with my own customized solvers and utilities, Tetgen, Netgen ,GMSH with OpenCascade support, BRL-CAD, Code-Aster, Salome Platform, Code Saturne, FreeMat, K3d...
Some of these apps have been compiled with Intel development toolbox, icc/ifort/mkl. Mainly scientific/Engineering stuff. How do I include all these packages in a custom Live Build...?
I'm trying to create backup/archive my Ubuntu 10.04 system files (so I can restore it in case my system get corrupted). More specifically, I'm trying to zip the important files in my root directory not including my home directory (which includes my documents which I backup separately/more frequently) to an external hard drive attached via USB (called 'My Book').
Since File Roller didn't give me quite the level of control I was looking for, I created a script that I could execute to backup and archive regularly. Here's a snippet: cd /media/"My Book"/"Linux Backups" NOW=$(date +"%b-%d-%y") LOGFILE=Backup_Root_FileSystem-$NOW.log sudo zip -r -T -v Backup_Root_FileSystem-$NOW / -x /media/'My Book'* /media* /proc* /sys* /mnt* /dev* /cdrom* /home* /'lost+found'* | tee -a $LOGFILE
Is it possible to backup and restore the system files of fedora 10_x86_64 so that if there will be any problem at OS , I can easily recover it from the previous backup files?
Attempting to create a backup script to copy files from one file system to a remote file system.
When I try this I get:
Quote:
# tar -cf - /mnt/raid_md1 | gzip -c | ssh -i ~/.ssh/key -l user@192.168.1.1 "cat > /mnt/backup/fileserver.md1.tar.gz" tar: Removing leading `/' from member names Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal. ssh: Could not resolve hostname cat > /mnt/backup/fileserver.md1.tar.gz: Name or service not known
[Code].....
I know that the remote file system dir is RW and the access is working fine. I am stumped...
I'd like to know what solutions do you, people, use to backup a live system that acts as a small home mail/file/irc/web server and some other purposes. For example, right now, to backup the mail, I have to stop fetchmail, kill vixie-cron to avoid any problem and then do the backup. Then restart vixie-cron.I wonder if there's any solution that will leave me do the backup without all this hassle.
best/simplest way to back up my triple-boot machine, which has Karmic 32-bit, Karmic 64-bit and Windows 7 (64-bit) installed on 3 equal slices of the internal 1TB disk. There are a total of 6 partitions (1 primary+1 logical partition each for the two Karmic, and 2 primary partitions for Win7), and I would like to back it up on an external disk such that the whole system can be restored as-is by writing over the disk. I guess this means correctly backing up data+partition table+MBR, and I would also prefer backing up only the used portion of the disk (rather than creating a 1TB mostly empty image file).
To my knowledge the only way to reliably do this is with "dd" command, but I have never used it ("fsarchiver" seems to be the next best option, but it cannot back up MBR yet; and "partimage" does not have ext4 support). As described here and here, I should run the following commands from a live boot:
1) To back up entire data in compressed format (using 1MB read block to speed up the process):
dd if=/dev/sda bs=1MB | gzip > /backup/image.gz
2) To back up MBR+partition table (stored within the first 512 bytes of the disk): dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 of=/backup/image.mbr
My system won't boot because the contents of /etc/fstab, while semantically valid, are not meaningful in my system - neither / or /home is defined, for example.For this reason too fsck will not run.
The grub menu displays OK.How do I rebuild fstab?How do I get permission to change any files on my system when using the Live-CD? Right now all attempts are stopped with a 'permission denied' message.
I am having trouble botoing into live system. Lubuntu 11.04 boots to command line. I am trying to boot from a CD at computer that is currently running Ubuntu and Xubuntu 10.04. I can see the dots on loading and also on shutdown but i can't start the X.Computer is an Old compaq presario 731EA, S3 graphics card with 256 MB total ram (32MB goes to graphics card). I tried nomodeset but same thing happens.
I dual boot windows and ubuntu on a particular machine and I'm looking for a comprehensive backup solution. Basically I'm after a single tool to clone the entire drive and do incremental backups with little to no concern for the underlying os.
My first instinct is to set up rsync to do the back up from ubuntu and just mount the windows partition when it does its thing so it backs that up too. Does that sound reasonable or am I missing something? At face value this seems like a reasonable answer, but I can't help but feel like something is "off" with that approach.
I wanted to know if there is variant of RollbackRX (www.rollbackrx.com.au) freeware or payable. RollbackRX used to Backup/Restore whole system changes in less than 1 minute before OS boot. And it does not consume a lot of free space.
I was trying to install openSUSE11.4 using the Live CD. But when it started copying the root filesystem, it hung on 15% and waited forever. The CD stopped spinning too.
For an older computer that won't boot off USB (like the live knoppix/ubuntu, etc) , is it possible to have it boot off of a special CD that will tell it to run the operating system off an attached USB thumbdrive?
I have a scheduled backup to run on our server at work and since the 7/12/09 it has be making 592k files instead of 10Mb files, In mysql-admin (the GUI tool) I have a stored connection for the user 'backup', the user has select and lock rights on the databases being backed up. I have a backup profile called 'backup_regular' and in the third tab along its scheduled to backup at 2 in the morning every week day. If I look at one of the small backup files generated I see the following:
Code:
-- MySQL Administrator dump 1.4 -- -- ------------------------------------------------------ -- Server version`
[code]....
It seems that MySQL can open and write to the file fine, it just can't dump
what is the best working software which could backup dual system.Host system is XP pro...and Backtrack on the second one.Is Acronis(xp based) will works?
Yesterday my wife was using our laptop and an upgrade manager dialogue box came up. She clicked yes to install upgrades, but at some point during this process the machine froze. She restarted, and I haven't been able to successfully boot since then. the final screen when trying to boot from the hard drive reads:
Killed mount: mounting /dev on /root/dev failed: No such file or directory mount: mounting /sys on /root/sys failed: No such file or directory mount: mounting /proc on /root/proc failed: No such file or directory Target filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init. No init found. Try passing init=bootarg.
[Code]...
I'm slowly getting the hang of Ubuntu. By now I know enough that a Live CD can fix most problems. So that's where I went after doing several searches about the error messages that were appearing. The menu screen works, but I can't get it to boot into the "Try ubuntu" mode. I tried changing the boot parameters to no avail. As the boot tries to load I can see a line by line report of errors- some are I/O errors and are in white, but many were in red, which seems bad from my mostly ignorant perspective. I saw lots of SQUASHFS errors among other things. I took a snapshot of the screen that was displayed when the boot failed- it's attached to this post (lots and lots of text to be typed otherwise). The reason I know it failed is because I've tried a half dozen times with the same exact result- once I let it sit for an hour+ just to make sure it was really frozen (a bit optimistic).
Relevant info: Ubuntu is running on a Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop. I think it's version 9, but could be 10. The Live CD I'm using is version 10 burned 1/4/2011. I'd be thrilled to hear any suggestions that folks might have.
what I'm doing, but I'm implementing some automatic security protocols on a ubuntu system, and I need to see a list of all users, including system ones. The reason for this is that I created a system user with a specific UID, and I forgot it. The 'user' command only lists the nonsystem users.
