backing up linux operating system

[enrineer55]

im looking to clone a hard drive from a 486/66 server for a small business. as money is tight ive been asked to do this without pay and not much success in linux in general.

they recently had a power supply failure which has been replaced. in the panic they realized that they have no backup and no way to reinstall the operating system. this is a combination linux and qnx system.

my question is how would i go about using ghost or a similar program to basically backup this hard drive to another. would it have to be an identical drive (50 pin 1.0g scsi) or could i use an ide drive.

as i dont even know all the question to ask any input would be greatly appriciated.

thanks in advance

pete

 

[ComradeXavier]

If the drive is in the same computer, I think you should be able to do it with the linux "dd" command.
You should probably boot linux from a cd or something, it might be bad to do this with the drive mountd.
For example, if the drive you're cloning is /dev/sda and the backup drive is /dev/sdb:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

it should read the entire disk from the first to the second, as long as the second is big enough to handle it.
do a:

man dd

to find out all of the options.

 

[Nothinman]

Ghost supports ext2, no idea bout whatever filesystem qnx uses though.

 

[manly]

Doesn't Ghost support any filesystems in drive to drive mode? Or does it need native FS support to do partition resizing? I haven't used Ghost in a long time.

I'm not sure dd applies, because it has zero knowledge of drive sizes. A long time ago, I did a dd from one drive to another different-sized drive. Linux booted up, but I recall there were major system problems.

I think the UNIX way is to use tar or cpio, but I don't have any details at this moment.

 

[Nothinman]

Doesn't Ghost support any filesystems in drive to drive mode? Or does it need native FS support to do partition resizing? I haven't used Ghost in a long time.

To do resizing it has to support the filesystem because otherwise how would it know what to update? But it can do block by block mode if the drives are the same size much in the same way dd would work.

 

[manly]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Doesn't Ghost support any filesystems in drive to drive mode? Or does it need native FS support to do partition resizing? I haven't used Ghost in a long time.

To do resizing it has to support the filesystem because otherwise how would it know what to update? But it can do block by block mode if the drives are the same size much in the same way dd would work.

Right, that's what I thought about even as I wrote my post. I guess that's another reason to use ext3 rather than XFS or ReiserFS, assuming you're a Ghost faithful.

 

[Nothinman]

I guess that's another reason to use ext3 rather than XFS or ReiserFS, assuming you're a Ghost faithful.

AFAIK ghost doesn't officially support ext3 yet, if not it should soon. You can 'revert' to ext2, ghost, restore, convert to ext3 if you want, but that seems excessive.

I use XFS, it's usually easier to just tar up any filesystems I need to backup =)

 

[enrineer55]

thanks for pointing me in the right direction. i think at this time ill load linux on a scsi drive and attempt to copy it to another drive before i try the real thing with the data drive.

ill get back soon

pete