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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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CentOS 6.3 - Best backup / restore solution? (self.linux)

submitted 6 months ago by StaySquared to c/[email protected]

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hello everyone!

My manager just brought to my attention that this organization has a CentOS 6.3 server - he didn't specify what it's hosting just yet but asked that I find a solution to do a full backup so that we may restore later onto bare metal with the option to migrate from CentOS to another Linux distro.

Has anyone had experience with backing up / restoring CentOS 6? And if you know what would be the best Linux distro to replace CentOS 6? Or even a step by step guide for both or either one?

Please and thanks in advance!

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[–] StaySquared 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Wow.. that's nice and clean - straight forward.

Thank you!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Note: do that from a live CD/USB or with the source drive mounted readonly. If you dd a mounted and used filesystem, you'll most likely end up with a corrupted and useless filesystem on the target.

[–] StaySquared 1 points 6 months ago

Nice! Thanks for the tip!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I want to point out that tools like dd or clonezilla will take a copy of the system as-is, in full.

If you want to make it more efficient you may want to look into Borg backups taken in raw mode. It's similar to what the above tools do, but splits the image into chunks and if you repeat the backup it only stores the chunks that changed.

This means you can take snapshots regularly with minimal storage waste. If you did this with the other tools you'd occupy the full image size each time you do it.

Borg also has remote support over SSH, and can do compression and encryption.

[–] StaySquared 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for the suggestion! I think the goal is to have a system as in image backup. But possibly to also back up the data and configuration to then restore that onto a new Linux distro. This is an assumption of course and I hope that is the case. I think my manager had been falling behind on updates/upgrades/back ups with some of the servers and now coming on board this will be my task(s) to handle.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Backing up just configuration is much simpler and efficient, but it depends greatly on how the system was set up. If you're just taking over it's probably safest to just take a disk image, with any of the methods.